


No One Wanted This (Nor Was It Asked For)

by personalized_radio



Series: NSFW/PWP [11]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: (Ian Isn't Included In The World), Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, And How He Hides It From The World, First Heat (Which Is Not The First Time), For A PWP There Is A Lot Of Worldbuilding, Gallagher family - Freeform, Healthy Dose of Angst and Misunderstanding (But Not As Much As Could Be Expected), Hey Guys The Milkovich Family Makes My Heart Hurt, Implied Attempted Incest (Because Its Terry), Knotting, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mickey The Omega, Milkovich Family, No actual non-con happens but it is a heavy fear for multiple characters, PWP, Sex In The Van, Slurs, Sort of follows canon but also really doesn't for obvious reasons, or at least it was supposed to be, so is forced prostitution and being beaten to death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 02:21:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20250580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/personalized_radio/pseuds/personalized_radio
Summary: Either way, the Milkovich family has a reputation. They’ve been in the neighborhood since before the neighborhood and they’re the white trash that’ll be there when the gentrification finally mucks out every other family but them.Something else that the Milkovich family has is the claim that all of them, down to the two disappeared twins in the west, were andarebeta, through and through.





	No One Wanted This (Nor Was It Asked For)

**Author's Note:**

> as the title says, this was neither wanted nor was it asked for by literally anyone but it had to be written and so it was. for a pwp, very little of this is actually sex. now that this is out of my system i would just like to say that i am absolutely incensed that SHAMLESS is the media that finally got me to write abo, after over a decade of very firmly denying myself the fun of this au. fuck you shamless (but also thanks?)
> 
> this is also me betaing my own fic for the first time in like a year and a half so?? sorry for every mistake that i know litters this bastard of a pwp

The Milkovich family can be traced back about four generations, when Great Gramps Denys Milkovich and his wife hopped off a boat with a thousand other Ukrainian strangers in a new land. Somewhere between Ellis Island and Chicago Southside, they had six daughters and five sons.

Two daughters went west, never to be heard from again, but the rest of the family settled down in Chicago. Some people say that they were there when the neighborhood heard its first gunshot. Others say the shot was fired by one of the bastards.

Either way, the Milkovich family has a reputation. They’ve been in the neighborhood since _before_ the neighborhood and they’re the white trash that’ll be there when the gentrification finally mucks out every other family but them.

Something else that the Milkovich family has is the claim that all of them, down to the two disappeared twins in the west, were and _are_ beta, through and through.

-

Terry always says, knocking back a beer in front of the game, feet picked up and resting on a pile of barely folded laundry that probably hasn't been washed since before Mickey can remember, that being beta is better than either of the other options. Knotheads go crazy at the smell of wet bitch and breeders aren't good for much else while a beta could get knocked up just as well without even needing to worry about a heat. One was led around by the knot and the other wasn't much use except for sitting on said knot. Betas don’t have to worry about that nonsense.

_Still_, he laments, sometimes, in his drunker moments; A breeder kid. He could stand if Mandy presented as a breeder. She could go for a high price if she wanted to sell that tail to a knothead or a beta wanting to pretend for a night. Or if Mickey, short as he was, wanted to pop a knot and use some of that knothead strength around the neighborhood to make collections a little easier, Terry wouldn't complain. Then Terry laughs, like it's all a joke and ruffles Mickey's hair. Mickey’s just a little too old to be a knothead, now. He’s turning ten soon, and knotheads presenting after ten are rarer than Mickey even knows the odds of.

Mikey just nods, sips his own beer and doesn't think about it much, more focused on trying to _acquire a taste_ for the shit the rest of his family drinks like water. He's a Milkovich. It's a given that he'll drink beer like water and present as a beta when he hits puberty.

He doesn't worry about it.

-

Mandy presents first, despite being a little over a year younger than him. Beta.

"It's because she's a girl," Jamie explains quietly so he doesn't wake Terry from all the way in Mickey's room. None of his brothers live with them anymore, not really, but Jamie and Iggy stayed the night after the presentation party at the Alibi. Joey and Colin had to leave but they’d plied Terry with so much alcohol before they’d left that everyone felt they’d at least contributed to the cause.

Mandy is fast asleep in Mickey's bed, back pressed up against the wall and curled up defensively. Mickey knows if he tries to go near her, she'll wake with fists already swinging and has resigned himself to sleeping on the floor in front of the door. He knows Jamie and Iggy will be passed out strategically as well, just in case.

Mandy has her own room but none of them expect, or want, her to use it for a while. Not until they’re all _sure_ that her presenting doesn't...change anything.

Mikey doesn't like the way Terry's eyes have been following Mandy around all night now that her scent has shifted just so.

For now, though, Iggy is passed out in Mandy's bed already and Jamie is sitting on the floor with Mickey. There’s at least two feet of space between them, because Milkovich men don't touch unless they're partying or fighting.

"None of us presented until we were, like, fourteen. Colin didn't drop his balls until he was fifteen. You're...you know. Normal. It's normal. Knotheads present real fuckin’ young, and then betas, you, know, we show up around puberty and then...well. You don’t gotta worry about being a breeder."

They all know what would happen if Mickey didn’t present by puberty. What he’d be. Colin’s first stint in Juvie had been to escape his dad when he hadn’t presented by his fifteenth birthday and they’d all thought, just for a second, that they were gonna have the first documented Milkovich breeder in the family. He wouldn’t have been around for long, not with Terry ready to burn out that blight on the family line, but. Well.

Colin had presented beta and that was what was important.

Mickey is thirteen. He has two years for his body to beta up.

He nods instead of answering. He hasn't fuckin’ talked this whole conversation; it had just been Jamie spouting off out of goddamn nowhere. Like he thinks Mickey needs the assurance.

Jamie goes to bed eventually and Mickey stretches out in front of the door. If someone needs the shitter, they're gonna be out of luck unless they want to wake him up.

-

It's dark out, but the busted street lamp that's been flickering longer than Mickey's been alive illuminates the room when he wakes up. The edge of the door had rammed into his back, that's what woke him.

He hears quiet cursing, familiar slurred grumbling. Across the room, sitting straight up in bed, his beta sister meets his wide eyes with her own glassy, terrified ones.

He shifts, firmly shutting the door again with his back and a loud, fake snore.

Terry goes away.

Neither of them sleep again but Mandy crawls to him and it isn't the first time he's held her when she was scared but it's the first time she's had to hold him back. There’s a terror in him, as he strokes her shaking back and lets her grip his tank so tight he’s sure her stupid nails are putting holes in it.

Sleeping in front of the door isn't sustainable, it'll just get him fucked up by a drunken fist if he keeps blocking the bathroom at night, but they'll think of something.

She's his little sister and they'll think of something.

-

The something, in the end, is a block of wood and two thick, fuck-off bolts into the wall to either side of Mandy's bedroom door.

It kind of reminds Mickey of the old cartoons, when people would just drop a 2x4 across a door and it would never open again.

"You just…" he explains once he's done drilling the bolts into the door jam and shows her how to take the thick lumber he'd jacked from the construction site a couple blocks over and jimmy it in place.

No matter how hard you try to push the door in, this is good fucking lumber and these are steel fucking bolts and the door ain't going nowhere until Mandy moves the wood and hides it under her bed again.

"Thanks, Mick." She says, quiet, because Milkoviches don't say shit like that.

"Yeah, whatever," he runs the back of his neck to avoid looking at her, feels the heat of his skin and the rough calluses on his fingers.

He keeps his door cracked the night, listens as he lays in his own bed, half wondering what he will use if it comes down to the door jam not working. He hears Terry lumbering around in the dark, his heavy, unsteady footfalls coming into the hallway and past Mickey's room.

He should keep going, all the way to the end where his room is. He stops, though, and Mickey doesn't need eyes to know Terry is in front of Mandy's room.

He hears the door handle turn, that special click that only Mandy's handle makes, and then the solid thunk of a body trying to push the door open.

"Ahh, what the fuck," he hears Terry mutter, hears him try again and again.

Finally, he can't stand it.

"Ay," he yells loudly, groggily, "What's with the noise!?"

The thudding stops and he hears Terry curse again, even louder, "Shut the fuck up, ya’ little shitstain, I'll make all the goddamn noise in my own goddamn house that I wanna god_damn_ make!"

And Mickey is sure that means Terry is coming for him, but Terry just tries Mandy's door again and then slams his way to his own bedroom finally and shuts the door so hard the whole house rattles.

Mickey sleeps after that and has to hide his smug smirk in the buttered bread he makes himself for breakfast when, the next morning, Terry lands on his face trying to throw himself through Mandy's now-unblocked door.

Mandy just eats her own bread, unbuttered because Mickey got to the last of it first, and doesn't pull any face at all.

-

Just because the Milkovich family is a true blood beta family doesn’t mean that every family in the neighborhood is. They’ve got a steady stream of breeders and knotheads popping up all over the place, both in school and in the streets.

Terry doesn’t mind doing business with either type, even if he looks down on them, and it takes all kinds, after all. Still, most families run one way or another or another.

The Gallagher family, as luck would have it, tend to run knothead. Mickey only knows that because he’s had a run-in or two with their bitch oldest sister and Lip, who’s in Mickey’s grade at school and is the smuggest, stupidest shithead that Mickey’s ever had the displeasure of paying to do his homework for him. Mickey’s heard around the block that the next two oldest - the ginger ones - both presented knothead already, too, and Mickey can’t imagine how much alpha postering must go on in that fucked up house.

Hey, his dad might be trying to sleep with his sister and he’s pretty sure he’s gonna die before he hits the ripe old age of sixteen, but at least he doesn’t have to deal with all the hormones he’s sure are building up there. Even the papers he gets from Lip are drenched in so much _alpha_ scent that he has to rub them all over his own clothes before he can hand them in.

-

He’s a late bloomer, his dad mutters darkly, when he makes Mickey sit on the couch and drink beer with his old man like the good old days.

Mickey knows what he is and it isn’t a late bloomer. He’s known for a while now, and he’s so fucking scared out of his mind he doesn’t know what else to do but drink and smoke and nod.

Jamie looks at him, sometimes, and Iggy, too. All of his brothers, actually. They look at him like they pity him, as he gets older and his fourteenth birthday passes and then the haf-way mark to his fifteenth.

He could go to Juvie, like Colin. He could wait it out, pray to whatever God will listen to just - make him a beta. He could maybe find some blockers. Jesus, he could go buy a knot at a sex shop and some knothead cologne and just spend the rest of his life pretending he presented alpha later than any other person on earth ever has and Terry will probably eat it right up.

He remembers what his dad used to say. Breeder tail goes for a high price on the market to unmated knotheads and betas who want to pretend to be unmated knotheads. He won’t amount to much, a male breeder Milkovich in the south side, but he probably won’t even get the chance to see how much money he can milk this for before his dad murders him.

To be fair, Milkoviches rarely amount to much no matter what their presentation and they don’t usually live as long as Terry has either.

-

He lays in bed thinking about it one night. His fifteenth birthday is coming up, and so is the ninth grade. He reckons he’ll get until sixteen if he doesn’t present before then, before his dad calls it and murders him in his sleep. Or in public, because no one would blame him, probably, for murdering a Milkovich breeder. The last thing this family needs is another way to procreate, most of the neighborhood would say.

They’d probably laugh, too, once word got out that Terry had killed him because he was a breeder.

He has to admit, he’d kind of like to see if any knotheads wanted to, like. Battle each other for him or some shit, like in the movies. It would be hilarious to see one of the Gallaghers and one of the Patels going at it just to tap his ass before he goes.

God, he’s gonna die a virgin.

It’s not so bad, he’s gotta admit. He’d probably get killed for that preference, too. Not enough that he’s gotta burn for knots, but he’s gotta want a specific kind of knot, too.

All in all, Mickey’s been dealt a pretty shit hand in the Sex and Gender portion of his creation. Fuck, and the Smarts. All he’s got are his good looks and charm.

He goes to sleep laughing at his own joke, because it’s that or cry.

He fucks a couple people after that - Angie for his first time to get the hang of it, a random dude who gives him a once-over, another random dude who wants to blow him. He doesn’t fuck-fuck anyone, though. He’s kind of terrified that it’ll - trigger him, or something.

At least when he kicks it, it’ll be as only a kind-of virgin.

-

“We could run.” Mandy says one day, when they’re alone in the house. It’s his birthday and his brothers and dad took a run yesterday so they’re going to be all alone for at least the next two days. He’s half positive the run had been Iggy’s idea - let he and Mandy have one last hurrah before the timer really starts to tick down. He’s sure all of his brothers know. All of his family knows - even Terry, as much as he’s pretending otherwise.

“Run where?” He plays along and they both know that neither of them are going any fucking where. The wood trick has been working for years, but Mandy’s eyes are still glassy half the time he looks at them. She’s either drugged up, drunk, or dealing with the nightly reminder that her drunk dad wants to fuck her and all her brothers can do is bar her door to stop him. There are some nights that he lays frozen in bed as his dad moves around, remembers what Terry had said about betas wanting to pretend to be knotheads for a night, about how good breeder tail is. Thinks about how if Terry is only being held back by some lumber from his own beta daughter, what might stop him from going after a breeder, son or not, or selling him off to the highest bidder instead of gutting him. It makes him so sick he ends up spending those nights hurling his guts out instead of sleeping.

But they can’t leave and they both know it and there’s nothing to be done. One day the wood won’t hold, one day he’ll present, one day their big brothers won’t be able to protect them anymore.

“Anywhere.” She says so he takes a deep drag from his cigarette and turns up the movie until neither of them can hear each other or their own thoughts anymore.

-

He drops out of ninth grade two months into the semester. Most of his classmates have presented by now - all except the ones that everyone knows are going to be breeders. Mickey can’t get outted like that, not by taking so long that it gets around as the only fucking option he _could_ be, so he peaces out.

-

His dad goes to jail. Iggy goes, too, but it’s the price they pay for being Milkoviches.

It’s not unexpected. Terry is in and out so often Mickey feels that they’ve mostly raised themselves, but it’s for longer than a couple weeks this time and - it may be the answer that Mickey has been praying for.

“I can fake it.” He says to Mandy as the idea forms around a fog of pot smoke and booze, “Mandy, I’ll - I can fake it and take a couple weeks, get the blockers going, get the scent around the house, I can -”

“Yeah,” Mandy agrees, warming to the idea, “Yes, yeah, we can -”

“Presentation party while he’s in the joint -”

“Get a plan worked out, figure -”

They talk, and it slurs and doesn’t make much sense, but the _plan_ forms and sticks and the next day he and Jamie borrow a car and drive all the way to the north side and spend actual money at a small little place that sells scent blockers strong enough to stunt a police dog and neither of them speak the whole time. When the cashier gives them a knowing look, Jaime sends her such a dirty glare that she actually scurries back.

Milkoviches don’t say _I love you_. Instead, they drive you to the other side of town and buy you scent blockers so your crazy dad doesn’t murder you for being born.

Instead, they throw a presentation party and send a picture to Terry in the clink and help Mickey pour the blocker liquid into a nondescript deodorant can that Mandy keeps in her room so Terry doesn’t discover it.

Instead, they help Mickey cover up something much more dangerous to all of them than a dead body.

By the time he turns sixteen, the universal truth is that every Milkovich from the moment they stepped off the boat to now has been a beta.

-

It’s about survival, now that the plan is in place.

He’s going to be the meanest, toughest, nastiest boogeyman on the block and he’s going to take a bat to anyone who might think he isn’t until they change their mind. He’s going to do his dad’s jobs and he’s going to do that while avoiding his dad as much as possible.

He’s been doing those things for so long now, though, that it’s not too much of a change. There’s still the problems that will come up when he _does_ finally present but those are for future-Mickey to worry about. Some omegas don’t gush it until their twenties. That’s five years longer than Mickey had thought he’d get in the first place.

-

Mandy comes home in tears one day, honest to go tears and fury and it sends a bolt of anger through Mickey so strong he feels rooted to the floor.

“Ian Gallagher,” She hisses through tears born more of fury that hurt, but he’s not one to differentiate.

He takes two brothers, cracks his knuckles, and goes off to beat the fuck out of some ginger knothead.

-

He ends up beating the fuck out of Lip because, well, someone gots to get beat down until Raggedy Andy shows his freckled face and Lip is the one that takes it just a little too far, as always.

It’s the start of what Mickey will later think of as the end of all of his careful planning, all of the secrets and the hard work he and his siblings have put into protecting him.

-

He doesn’t think about it when he wakes up to a tire iron and a pissed off ginger. Or when he and Gallagher go at it, throwing each other around the room with the tire iron between them. He gets Gallagher under him, thighs to either side of his head so he can bash his face in with the iron, and then their eyes meet and he’s frozen because he can smell the arousal, the alpha coming off Gallagher in waves, even under him.

There’s a part of him, the back of his head, that sounds just like Terry. It reminds him that this is what he’s good for, that he’s a fuckin’ breeder and he’s for sitting on knots and that’s just about it, but that dark part can’t break through the freeze-frame of this moment.

He’s never actually seen anyone present before, but he - he feels it. The way his body suddenly just...shifts. Clicks into place. He’s never really noticed his scent before except for the overpowering beta scent he’s been wearing for close to a year, but now all he can smell is omega.

The freeze-frame ends, shatters, and it’s because they move at the same time, Gallagher literally gripping his thighs and shoving him even as he’s ripping his own shirt off and then dragging Gallagher’s off, too.

There are so many clothes, and he has never needed to be naked so badly. They grind against each other, hips rolling to get some stimulation through their clothes. He’s burning up, he’s on _fire_ -

“You’re a-” Gallagher says when he’s got Mickey boxed against the mattress and wall, towering over him despite being about the size of a paper clip, because he has to ruin everything, has to ruin this and Mickey is reacting before he can think, clamping a hand over his mouth so hard his knuckles go white.

“Don’t.” He hisses, trying to sound as dangerous as he has ever sounded even though he’s on his back and his thighs are gripping Gallagher’s hips between his like a silent prayer. Gallagher can not fucking say it. That word cannot be uttered in these walls.

Gallagher nods as best he can under Mickey’s hand and Mickey, against his better judgement, carefully let's go. There’s a hand on his bare hip, stroking up and down his side, over his ribs and the bruises and scars and dirt and grime. He would call the gesture intimate except he can tell that Gallagher isn’t even thinking about it, is just touching to _touch_, because it’s instinct. Instinct to get his scent all over Mickey and get him to stop broadcasting that he’s open and willing when Gallagher is right here.

From the living room, he hears a loud snort, a warning sign that Terry is not deep in a drunken stupor but is, in fact, barely even day-drunk and is just napping.

It should douse the heat in ice but all it does it ratch it all up. This is it. This is the moment he’s been dreading and waiting for since he realized what he is. None of them have ever been around a presenting omega, because they were all fucking idiots to think that those blockers, that beta scent, could cover _this_ up.

Or maybe it’s just that the room is so small, badly ventilated and the window all closed up against the cold. Either way, all he can smell is himself and Gallagher, these strong-ass pheromones making his nose stuffy and his eyes watery and his head feel all cottony.

“Jesus, Mickey,” Gallagher tries to pull away and it is, perhaps, the most painful thing that Mickey has ever experienced in his entire life. Terry has put cigarettes out on him, Jamie once bashed his face in so bad they had to take him to the hospital, he got his foot run over when he was fourteen and Ian Gallagher trying to detangle their bodies is what is going to physically kill him before his father ever even realizes what has happened.

“Don’t.” He says again and it’s not dangerous at all. He arches, trying to entice, and Gallagher falls for it hook, line and sinker. He stops trying to get away, grabs at Mickey’s wrists and holds them tight enough to bruise, leans down to nose at Mickey’s neck, his jaw, his shoulder. Mickey won’t bare his throat, he won’t do that, but he doesn’t mind letting Gallagher scent him if it’ll get him to stay just a little longer. Until the end, maybe.

“Hey,” Gallagher touches his lips to Mickey’s ear, “I want to get you out of here. Wanna come with me?”

_No_, Mickey doesn’t want to _fucking_ go with him. This is his room. This is his goddamn - his _nest_, motherfucker. Everything smells right - wrong, it all smells like beta cologne, but that is familiar for the moment - and it is _his_ and, if anything, Gallagher should bring things _here_, not bring Mickey somewhere else.

But then there is that snoring-snort again and his heart is thudding as intensely as his dick is.

“Why?” he finally manages to say, suspicious.

“Because,” Gallagher says simply, “You smell really fucking good right now and if your dad walks in on us, I’ll kill him.”

And that - that is dark shit. Seriously dark shit. Another reason that Terry had always looked down on knotheads; that hot-for-slick instinct that gets them going crazy the second they felt a threat. They weren’t even careful about it, didn’t think about clean up when they went wild. Just killed and fucked, like animals. It barely even holds up in court these days but they still fuckin' do it.

It’s maybe the hottest thing Mickey has ever heard. He’s thought of a lot of ways that his storyline could end here; prostitution, incestuous rape, murder. Possibly all three. He’s never really contemplated a scenario where a knothead would get so overwhelmed by his scent that he’d just up and kill his dad _for_ him.

And sure, it’s not _Mickey_ Gallagher would kill for. It’s that Mickey is a viable, fresh off the fuckin’ boat breeder who he wants to claim and if Mickey were literally anyone else on earth, Gallagher would have the same reaction but that doesn’t _matter_ right now. It’s not like it isn’t the same for Mickey - it’s not hot because it’s Gallagher, it’s hot because it’s an alpha that _wants him_ in a way that he’s never been wanted in his life. That would fight for him.

He still has to think about it, though. He’s in sweatpants and a tank and it’s the middle of winter and he just woke up, fought half asleep, nearly beat someone to death with a tire iron and now he’s aching so deeply he’d probably shove said tire iron directly into his own ass if he thought it would help it end.

He’s -

Underneath the lust and the _need_, he’s fucking terrified.

Terry farts in his sleep, loud enough that they both jump, and he’s nodding before he can decide against it. No matter what else happens, he needs to get the fuck out of this house. He can’t be here when Terry wakes up. He needs to open all of his windows and he needs to bundle up in literally every piece of clothing he has until no one can smell him or see him or recognize him and then he needs to _run_.

This time when Gallagher tries to pull away, he uses the hand not pinning Mickey’s wrists to the bed to get him to relax his thighs. It’s a fight, Mickey’ll be honest. He knows, logically, that they need to go - but letting Gallagher actually _leave _his position is another story.

Still, it happens. Gallagher gets him to stop holding his hips hostage and then goes about shutting the door and jamming the couch in front of it - “Just in case,” he explains - and then he goes and collects every piece of clothing off the floor that he can and drags Mickey up to start pulling it on him.

Mickey is disoriented and weak. If Gallagher wants that gun back, now is the fucking time to take it. He can barely see straight, can barely think straight. He wants his brothers, but would rather cut his own tongue out than let them see him like this. Wants Mandy, but doesn’t want to let her see him like this _either_.

He’s so alone, he realizes. He’s so alone, except for this ginger knothead who’s only taking care of him right now because he wants to take him somewhere more secluded to fuck the shit out of him.

He’s scared. Mickey has been scared in his life plenty of times, terrified even. Mostly of Terry, but other things, too. He used to be terrified of clowns when he was younger. Read a book on John Wayne Gacy and took a bat to every clown he saw for the next four months until he figured that he should wait until the clown comes at him first so he doesn’t get arrested. Terry was sometimes an abstract fear, like what he would do the day this happened, but he was often a very real fear, too.

He’s never, though, been scared of a fucking Gallagher. Not until now. Because he knows that whatever Ian Gallagher wants to do to him, he’ll go along with it and he’ll go along with it as happy as can be because he’s a breeder, he’s meant for breeding, and that is what Gallagher wants to do to him when all is said and done.

He lets Gallagher get him into three sweatshirts - one of which is Iggy’s - and then his winter coat, holed up and thin in some places as it is. He gets jeans over the sweats with Mickey’s admittedly unhelpful help and then gets him into four pairs of eight different socks before shoving his smelly boots on. Gloves, next, thick like he’s going out to shovel snow.

Lastly, he pulls a beanie over Mickey’s head, and then the hood from his coat on over that before he takes a step back and looks at him approvingly.

“You’ll be warm.”

“I’m gonna overheat, fuckface,” Mickey snarks back before he can help himself but Gallagher just grins and starts to finally dress himself. The last thing he does before he moves the couch back is throw the window in both his bedroom and the bathroom open and drag all of the sheets off the bed to kick them underneath.

“Don’t want him catching your scent,” He explains casually, like that is a normal fucking response to Mickey’s _what the fuck_ eyebrow raise.

He doesn’t offer a hand so much as grab Mickey’s shoulder and pull him up. Mickey staggers, legs weak and wobbly, and Gallagher puts a steady hand on his back but doesn’t try to like - hold him up or anything. Just let him get his balance, shake his head until it stops spinning so much.

“Where are we going?” he says through thin inhales. The beta cologne is making him nauseous.

“My place.” Gallagher says simply.

“Your place.” Mickey parrots. “You mean the one filled with a million goddamn knotheads?”

“They won’t touch you.” Gallagher frowns, like Mickey is _stupid_ for even hinting at the suggestion.

“No.” Mickey shakes his head, “No one can know, no one can -” It can’t get back to his dad. He knows that they’d all blackmail him in an instant. Hell, _Ian_ would blackmail him. Will blackmail him. He can’t imagine what Lip would do with this kinda ammo. What kind of hell he’d put Mickey through.

Breeder tail, Terry always said. Fuck. Fuck, Jesus, is Ian taking him back to his den to get passed around like a party favor? Do knothead families share? Is he gonna end up some fuckin’ - some fuckin’ breeder whore sat somewhere for Ian and Lip and, what, their sister to pass around when they’re bored, like he’s -

“Hey,” Gallagher is suddenly in his space, hands on either side of his face and Mickey is breathing so weird, like he can’t get enough air no matter how hard he tries to draw it in. There’s nothing but red hair and freckles and bright eyes looking at him, forcing him to stare right back. He can’t smell anything but Gallagher and it’s not overpowering so much as it is comforting.

“Whatever weird shit’s goin’ through your fucked up head,” Gallagher says low - he’s a shrimp of a kid, there’s no reason he could be able to sound like that, fuck - “Is not what’s happening. I’m gonna take care of you.”

“You don’t even fuckin’ know me, dude,” Mickey swallows and he’s sweating under all these layers and freezing all at once. He wants to bury himself in Gallagher and claw his eyes out all at once to get him to stop _looking_ at him like that. "I actually robbed you."

“Think of it this way.” Gallagher says gently, “I care about your sister. She cares about you. If that’ll make you relax, then just think about it like that, right? I’m gonna take care of you because she would want me to.”

It’s not the strongest bullshit Mickey has ever been fed, nor is it the weakest he’s accepted.

He nods once, shortly.

“No alpha den.” He still says, because he can’t - he can’t. He’ll go writhe this out under the bridge and take a homeless knothead dick down if he’s gotta but he’s not being led into that house by any consentual fucking means.

“Okay.” Gallagher agrees, that easy, and it should throw Mickey but all it does is make him lean forward, press his forehead to Gallagher’s neck and breath in his scent as deeply as his lungs will allow.

They finally leave the house. Gallagher keeps his body between Mickey and the sleeping Terry as they creep through the living room and then makes him leave first before he closes the door behind him. Mickey is at least twenty pounds heavier and has a helluvah lot more experience fighting Terry off than Gallagher does, but if it’ll appease his knothead ego or what the fuck ever, Mickey won’t argue.

It feels good to remember that. He’s stronger than Gallagher, usually. Maybe he’s a little weaker now but he’s got muscle mass and height and - and -

And he’s not the brightest light bulb in the hardware store but he’s smart enough to win a good fight and not afraid to play dirty. He’s still terrified out of his goddamn mind but he isn’t _helpless_, even like this.

This isn’t a heat, he reminds himself. This is just him presenting. He’ll be back to normal in a day or two. Back to himself.

Gallagher stops in front of their busted gate to fuss with Mickey’s beanie. He pulls it low over his ears, until it’s nearly covering his eyes and then he pulls his hood over even more, until Mickey can barely see anything but the sidewalk in front of him. On the upside, it means no one else can really see him, though he wouldn’t be surprised if someone recognized the coat. He’ll have to toss it after all this, get a new one that will hopefully throw off any suspicion.

He can still smell himself, but it’s muffled. Give his body an hour and he’ll have soaked through these clothes easy, but that’s still sixty whole minutes for Gallagher to get him somewhere - safe. Get him somewhere that he can take care of Mickey, whatever that means.

“We have a van,” Gallagher starts to talk once they’re away from the Milkovich home. “In the backyard. Everyone uses it every once in awhile but I’ll get you in there. You’ll feel better once you’re comfortable.”

“‘fuck would you know ‘bout what would make me _comfortable_?” Mickey snaps back, hunching his shoulders against the guiding touch still on his back. He doubts Gallagher even knows he’s still doing it.

“Well,” Gallagher says thoughtfully, “Seein’ as Frank’s an omega ‘n’ all -”

“Your _dad_?” Mickey actually stops but Gallagher doesn’t and he’s back to trekking to keep up almost immediately, “What?”

“Oh, yeah,” Gallagher nods, like he’s not just rocked Mickey’s world. He’s always just...well. Assumed. With all the Gallaghers being knotheads, it had kind of just made sense that Frank would have been, too. But Gallagher just nods like it’s whatever. “Anyway, sometimes he goes through heats. Monica’s not usually around when they hit and not even Frank’ll spend his heats with someone that isn’t his mate so we pack ‘em up in the van.”

“That’s...fuckin’ gross.” Mickey has to admit. Is it better to go inside and get passed around like a birthday whore or get all nested up in the Gallagher patriarch’s heat den?

“Yeah, well, I’m not too happy about it, either.” Gallagher shrugs, “But it’s safe. I’ll tell everyone to stay the fuck out.”

“And they’ll actually listen to that?”

“They’re alphas, Mick,” Gallagher says, like that means something and like they’re _friends_. “Of course they’ll stay away if I bring an omega home. You don’t fuck with another alpha when they’ve got an omega around. Lip brings his home all the time.”

Mickey does stop then, stops up short and refuses to take another step when Gallagher tries to get him going again.

“Let’s get one thing clear, here,” Mickey holds up a finger, gloved because of course Gallagher wouldn’t have forgotten to cover even his hands. “I’m not _yours_.”

“Oh, no, shit,” Gallagher pulls a face like _he’s_ the one that’s hurt, like he has any idea how fucking humiliating this is, to have to be smuggled out of his own goddamn house by the guy who was just trying to beat him with a tire iron and then swamped into a dried out old breeder’s heat den just so he doesn’t get choked to death, sold or raped by his own damn dad.

“No, that isn’t what I - I know, man. I know you aren’t - that isn’t what I meant. Bad wording. I’m sorry. I meant Lip brings his girlfriends around, not - you know. That’s not how we roll.”

“Not how we _roll_,” Mickey repeats with a sneer, but he _does_ feel slightly mollified and lets Gallagher start to walk again.

Gallagher just gives a secretive smile, like they’re sharing a joke or something, and Mickey would punch it off his face except, somehow, Gallagher had chosen just the amount of clothing required to keep Mickey feeling warm and comfortable in this cold. Even his face is warm from the collar of his jacket zipped up to just under his lips. He can feel the heat of Gallagher’s hand on his back like a brand, but it’s more comforting than demanding.

Gallagher rambles as they walk the blocks between their houses and acts like he doesn’t even notice when, more and more, Mickey needs to rely on him to stay standing up straight. To continue walking.

The Gallagher house comes into view but Gallagher stops them before Mickey’s forced to freeze them himself.

“Stay right here.” Gallagher says, unwrapping his own scarf so he can wrap it around Mickey’s neck instead, hide his face even more. Gallagher’s nose is bright red. His scarf smells so overwhelmingly like him that Mickey can’t help but close his eyes. “I’m going to go make sure the van is clear and let everyone know to stay the fuck out for a while.”

“You’re _sure_ none of those nosy fuckin’ kids will come snooping?” Mickey asks, just because he _has_ to be sure and Gallagher being sure is as close as he’s gonna get here.

“I promise, Mick.” Gallagher cups his face through the scarf. And then Gallagher is gone, to the house like a shot and through the gate with one last look at Mickey over his shoulder.

Mickey doesn’t know how long he waits. It could be maybe fifteen, twenty minutes; it could be an hour. What he does know is that his knees start to tremble at some point and he’s so fucking hungry by the time Gallagher gets back that he actually thinks about just resortng to cannibalism.

“Don’t worry,” Gallagher finally wraps an arm around his waist, supporting him the final yards to the back of the house, "I'll get you something to eat. Relax, okay?"

"_You_ relax." Mickey retorts hotly, but lets himself be dragged to a beat up old van that probably had seen better days in the, like, ‘30s.

There's no mattress or anything inside, no pile of comfortable blankets. There are, though, four pillows and a comforter that, when Mickey carefully climbs in, smells just like Gallagher. The pillows do, too, though not all like Ian. He tosses the one that smells like Lip so hard that it sails out of the van and Gallagher, laughing, retrieves it and tosses it into the front. The other smells like their bitch alpha sister but that’s almost a comfort. He gets the sense that she, of all of them, would treat an omega right. With his chosen three and the comforter, he finally feels himself start to settle again. There’s no Terry in the living room, waiting to sniff him out, no alpha den breathing down his neck. Just him, and the Gallagher that he’s chosen to trust because Ian cares about his sister and Mandy cares about Mickey.

“Give me your clothes.” He says without thinking, already stripping his off. It’s instinct, not rational thought, but Gallagher doesn’t seem surprised. He does as requested, strips off his jacket and his two shirts and his jeans until he’s standing in the middle of the Chicago winter in nothing but his stick thin, pale ass body and some boxer shorts Mickey is sure are second or third hand. Mickey strips down, too, and then surrounds himself with the bounty. He knows what this is called from the single Sex Ed. class he’d bothered to listen to, knows he’s testing out his new nesting instincts for when he actually goes into heat and won’t be able to rest until he’s comfortable.

He could do with another blanket.

He picks at the one he’s already got, decides to press his luck.

“You got another one of these, Red?” he muffles through the scarf he still has wrapped around his neck, the only thing he’s still wearing except for his boxers and a pair of socks. He should be freezing, it’s not like the van is heated, but he’s pretty comfortable now. Hungry as fuck, but still.

“I’ll grab my sheet.” Gallagher nods, looking too fucking fond for someone Mickey has stolen from, beaten up, and hormone-drowned into helping him.

“And food.” Mickey says, because what the fuck ever.

“And food.” Gallagher promises.

“And I need to call my sister.” Mickey makes the final request, trying to play it off like it’s nothing, like it’s just another thing he wants to put in the nest he’s gonna spend the next couple days.

“And a phone.” Gallagher says, softer, and then closes the door and heads back inside. Mickey takes the time to rearrange the van again, use Lip’s pillow after all just to fluff up the comforter against the back doors and curl up underneath it and his and Gallagher’s clothes. He’s thankful for all the sweaters now, that they soaked up his sweat and smell and fill the void that demands that he make his own place in this van. Thankful that Gallagher must have been wearing those clothes all day, too, and hasn’t washed them in a couple days, he’d bet, because they smell potent and fucking disgusting in the best way possible.

The bitch sister’s pillow goes under Gallagher’s, another place that is fluffed up so he can press his face into Gallagher’s scent more easily. He doesn’t look up when the door opens again, can smell who is it before Gallagher is even climbing in with him and slamming the door shut again, goods in hand.

The air is cool but stuffy. It’ll fill with their scents, combine soon, and that will be enough.

“Usually,” Gallagher starts talking again, because he never stops, “Usually, when omegas present, they’ve got family, you know. People they trust with them. It’s not all, you know. Raging boners and sex when you present.”

“Why the fuck are you saying this to me right now, Gallagher?” Mickey means to sound rougher than he does. Instead, he just sounds a bit content. He can smell the ham sandwich that he’s been brought as a token and when he peeks out from his little face fort, there’s a jug of what he’s sure is sink water and a whole bag of unopened, generic potato chips to go along with the feast of _two_ sandwiches. He sees cheese sticking out of the bread, too, and his mouth waters.

If nothing else, he picked a good knothead to get fucked up with.

He reaches out and is handed a sandwich without any teasing. Gallagher doesn’t even watch him stuff it down his throat, just hands him the water so he can guzzle half the damn gallon and then burp obnoxiously because he’s still him. Still Mickey Milkovich, breeder or not.

“I dunno, really.” Gallagher admits, “I just figured you probably don’t have a very good frame of reference. For this stuff, I mean. Presenting omega.”

“But you do.” Mickey sneers and accepts the second sandwich much slower when it’s offered instead of a sharp remark.

“I mean, for a while - I guess, for a while we thought Debbie might be an omega.” Ian shrugs, “She was kind of a late bloomer for our family. We figured she might be a beta or an omega and studied up. Ended up not being needed but can’t say I don’t like having the knowledge, you know?”

“What? You need it often or somethin’? ‘Xactly how many breeders you around to present with?” Mickey snaps harder than he maybe intended, jealousy flaring so bright in his chest that it nearly sends the sandwich he’d just swallowed whole right back up.

“Nope,” Gallagher pops the bag open and eats a chip slowly, “Just you.”

And it’s said soothingly, if in a subtle way. A way that makes Mickey’s hackles go down, just a little.

“I don’t care.” He finishes his sandwich, slower than the first, and drinks just a little more water. He’s thirsty, _so_ thirsty, but the water isn’t doing it for him. Beer sounds absolutely disgusting right now. He needs the water to be colder, but there ain’t an ice box this side of the tracks that someone would be willing to share with a Milkovich or Gallagher and he wouldn’t send Gallagher back out, even if there was. He can’t have it all and his body better get used to that. He makes himself drink more of the tepid water.

“You wanna call Mandy?” Gallagher asks when Mickey’s finished almost the whole gallon. He’s gonna have to piss like a racehorse soon

He hands over the phone without making Mickey answer and Mickey - doesn’t know how to go about this. Neither he nor Mandy have cell phones. After a few minutes of thinking, staring at the flip phone blankly, he settles for the only number he can think to call.

“Ay, this is Jamie. Fuck ya’ want?” His brother’s voice is tinny and far away, but it’s almost enough of a relief to hear him that Mickey has to shuffle his body tighter, cover his face for a second.

“Jamie.” He says, and he hates how weak his voice is.

“...Mick.” Jamie bellows something away from the phone and all background noise goes silent, “What’s wrong?”

“I -” Mickey swallows, just once, “I know you’re...where ever the fuck you guys are right now, but I don’t know how to get a hold of Mandy without calling the house and I can’t talk to dad right now, man, I can’t talk to -”

“Mickey, Mick, hey,” Jamie cuts him off and it’s as gentle as his voice really has the ability to go. Colin’s the soft one, really, the one that can do the whole comforting thing - not that he’s allowed to even pull that voice with Mickey, usually. But Jamie is his oldest brother and it’s not Colin’s comforting voice he needs right now, but Jamie’s rough, steady tone.

“It happened, Jamie,” Mickey says and has to turn away from Gallagher, feeling exposed in whole new ways.

“...where was dad?”

“Sleeping in the living room.” Mickey runs a shaky hand through his hair. “I was - me ‘n’ this - well. I was with an alpha and things got out of hand and then suddenly it was -” he can’t go on, too humiliated to try to find words.

The thing is, Mickey wasn’t smart. Not like Lip, not like most kids at school. He wasn’t good at the academic shit.

He _is_ good at the street shit, though. He’d been bossing his brothers around since before Colin had spent his first night in Juvie. He’s not used to being the one that needs to be told what to do. He’s not used to being the one that needs _help_. He’s the one that they turn to when they need a plan, the one that his dad can count on, the one that no one has to fuckin’ worry about. The only thing any of them have ever had to worry about with Mickey is _this_.

And now it’s happened, and he doesn’t know what to do except sit in this little space with Ian fucking Gallaghor and let himself eat ham sandwiches and drink water and try to keep himself together as his body begs for more of what was happening before they came to their senses in his room.

“You safe?” Is Jamie’s first question and Mickey looks at Gallagher again, nods without thinking about it.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m. I’m safe.”

Gallagher watches him, eyes dilated.

_I think_. He almost adds, but holds back.

“You with that knothead?” Jamie asks, slower, “He keepin’ you safe?”

“Yeah.” Mickey swallows. They’ve never really talked about the breeder thing. They’ve _never_ really talked about the whole..._him_ thing. But of course Jamie knew. Jamie probably knew before any of them, before Mickey knew.

“Here’s what I’m gonna do.” Jamie says like he’s going over the game plan for a run, “I’m gonna call the house until Mandy picks up. I’m gonna give her this number. This a good number to call?”

“This a good number for Mandy to call back on?” he asks, a little woodenly, and Gallagher shakes his head immediately.

“Tell her to call me.” Gallagher says, “She has a better number.”

“He says to tell her to call...uh. Call Ian Gallagher.”

“Gallagher.” Jamie repeats, slow like tar. “You were with a Gallagher?”

“Yes, I was with a goddamn Gallagher!” Mickey snaps back like a viper, venom seeping through every word, “We were wrestling with a goddamn tire iron when I started _leaking slick out of my asshole_, Jamie, we weren’t on a _fucking_ date!”

He’s loud enough that Ian actually puts his hands up, looking a little worried as he checks the windows to see if anyone heard, but Mickey is breathing too hard to care again, breathing like he can’t get enough air, breathing like he’s going to start - god, if he cries he’s going to cut his own eyeballs out himself, it’s bad enough that he can feel the seat of his pants slowly seeping and now - now he’s had to admit to his _brother_ that he’s - that he’s - fuck, _fuck _-

“Mickey, yo, man, hey, calm down, I was just - fuck, I was surprised, okay, I didn’t - expect one of them to do us any favors.” Jamie tries for that comforting tone again but it just sounds short and mean, like he’s mocking Mickey, like he’s blaming him, and Mickey wants to hurl the phone so far away that he never hears anyone’s voice again.

“Yeah, well,” he clutches the phone tighter so he doesn’t throw it away, “He and Mandy are tight, you know, he’s doin’ a guy a fuckin’ favor.”

“I’ll bet he is,” Jamie grumbled, “You tell me if he takes advantage, Mick, I don’t give a fuck about your goddamn ego, it’s a goddamn felony to touch a presenting omega and -”

“I don’t need you to give anyone the fucking shovel talk for me, I can bury them myself.” Mickey whips back so sharp Jamie cuts off and the line goes quiet.

“I’m just.” Jamie finally says, “Fuck. I was supposed to be there. We were supposed to be there. Iggy is still inside, Joey and Colin and me are - I mean. You weren’t supposed to be alone with Terry.”

“Bound to happen eventually,” Mickey dismisses, “Happened. I just...tell Mandy I’m...safe or whatever. I’ll be back whenever my stench dies down. I’m...probably gonna need more of that stuff from that place, you know?”

“We’ll get it on our way back. You sure you’re okay?”

“Fucking hungry.” Mickey says, because that’s the only urge he’s willing to admit to his brother. “But fine. Hot. Smell like a bitch.”

“You always smell like a bitch, bitch.” Jamie says to lighten the mood and it works enough for Mickey to crack a smile.

“I need to hang up before I use all the minutes on this piece of shit. Don’t get shot.”

“Don’t get pregnant.” Jamie snarks right back and then they hang up and Mickey stares at the phone for about as long as he had before he’d made the call in the first place. He feels...not better. But a little more settled. If Gallagher is a fucking liar and ends up dragging Mickey into his alpha den, at least his brothers will know who to go to when they find his dead body or something.

“Good talk?” Gallagher asks and offers the chips in exchange for the little flip phone.

Mickey accepts the trade.

“Touch me and he’ll kill you,” he drones and he likes that Gallagher picks up that it’s a joke, that he laughs that kinda stupid laugh that Mickey has really only heard on the few occasions he’s been around when Ian and Mandy were together.

“Oh.” He says, because he’s now just remembered, “Gallagher, you’re fucking my _sister_!”

“What?” Gallagher blinks, slow, and then realization dawns, “Oh, we aren’t -”

“Oh my god, I was gonna get dicked by the same dick that my sister -” Mickey kind of wants to retch. He’s really going to throw up those sandwiches now. Fucking _Gallagher_, with his nice eyes and lips and strong hands on his thighs and around his waist and dressing him and - and getting this _nest_ together and - he’s -

“No, Jesus, Mickey, come on,” Gallagher reaches out for him but Mickey flinches back so hard that the van rocks. Before, Gallagher’s scent was a comfort, a reminder that he wasn’t alone, that he was being cared for - now it was - _I care about your sister_, Jesus _Christ_ -

“I’m gay!” Gallagher shouts right in the middle of Mickey’s panic attack, “Holy shit, Milkovich, I’m a fuckin’ queer, okay, Mandy isn’t - she’s not my girlfriend, we’re just friends!”

Mickey goes still, the disgust that had been welling up leveling out. It’s still there, half-way up his throat, ready at any moment to spew chunks of emotional upheaval all over this nest and Gallagher. He’s never been this fast to emotional responses before. The fuckin’ hormones probably resettling, rebuilding his body. He’s gonna be a bitch for the rest of his short life, he guesses. Just throwing up every time something kinda uncomfortable happens and then pretending he’s still a fuckin’ Milkovich while he panics all over the place. Maybe his dad _should_ kill him.

“You’re all over the place.” Gallagher says, kind of sad, and Mickey narrows his eyes enough that he immediately puts his hands up, “It’s, I swear, it’s normal. You’re keeping your shit together pretty well. I broke all of Fiona’s hangers when I presented. You’re just yelling a little.”

Mickey doesn’t dignify that with a response. Instead, he just shovels a handful of chips into his mouth and swallows without chewing enough. He feels kind of like swallowing shards of glass with how the chips scrape going down.

Gallagher doesn’t seem to be expecting an answer. He’s come back with new clothes, a thick sweater that’s too big for him across the shoulders and the sleeves but not long enough at the waist and a pair of ripped up jeans that have seen at least four other bodies before his. He isn’t wearing shoes, though, just some fuzzy socks that Mickey would make fun of if he didn’t want to literally shove his face into them and inhale like some fucking freak.

He talks and Mickey listens. He gets too full eventually and shoves the chips away so Gallagher puts them in one of the front seats and doesn’t mention that Lip’s pillow has been repurposed. He lays down and Gallagher gets out to return the phone he borrowed and bring his own, even cheaper one back with him.

The sheet he had brought along with the food gets spread out over the both of them because Mickey wants to trap their heat together once he makes Gallagher strip again. He still aches inside, still _wants_, but not so much that he’s going to beg for it. If Gallagher doesn’t want to get on him, then Mickey isn’t gonna cry himself to sleep about it.

It’s still light out. It’s still light out even though it feels like years since he let Gallagher sneak him out of his own damn house and he’s exhausted.

“You’re supposed to be tired.” Gallagher says quietly, like his own personal breeder Yoda.

“Will you shut the fuck up with that, you goddamn Encylopedia? If I wanna know if I’m off, I’ll goddamn ask.”

“Okay,” Gallagher shrugs, like it’s that simple, like Mickey didn’t just bite his head off for being helpful, like he hasn’t been doing that this whole time. He hasn’t come for Mickey, though. Hasn’t tried to come for him since they rutted together on the bed. Even then, Ian had been the one to put a stop to them. The one to help him up and dress him and walk him and feed him and nest with him in a private den that his family won’t come near. And he hasn’t come for him.

“You don’t want to fuck me?” Mickey asks into the quiet that settles, blinks slow, drooping deeper into the pillows and blankets. His bed at home isn’t the most comfortable but it’s familiar and easy to sleep in. The van floor is hard but the blankets and pillows and clothes wrapping their scents together are almost as good as a whole mattress. He’d take the van over his bed right now with no hesitation.

He’s almost giddy, watching Gallagher flush bright red.

“I -” he starts to stutter and then clears his throat. “It’s fucked up to get with an omega just presenting, dude. Call me when you’re settled and we’ll, uh. Revisit. If you want.”

“So you _do_ wanna fuck me?” He almost asks if he looks like a fag to Ian, but the answer to that is...so insanely obvious that it would just insult them both. If Ian said yes, Mickey would have to fight him. If Ian said no, Mickey would know he was lying and would have to fight him. Either way, it’s too much work. Mickey is comfortable and sleepy and content. The ache in his body isn’t subsiding but it’s...easing, sort of. Shifting from wanting to fuck to wanting to bask.

“Mickey, I’ve been between your thighs.” Ian blinks back at him, grins a little smugly, like he knows what it’s like to be between a guy’s thighs and the power he’s got when he’s there, “I’d be an idiot not to want to fuck you.”

“Yeah, okay,” Mickey sniffs, starts to roll to put his back to Ian and then can’t make himself do it. “If you’re too goddamn noble to fuck me, at least come, like. Lay on me or something. I’m going to tear my own skin off.”

“You want -” Ian starts and then stops, like he’s remembering what Mickey had said about asking if he wanted explanations. Mickey is...strangely charmed by that. Instead of talking, Ian scoots closer, wraps himself around Mickey like an octopus. For a kid that’s shorter and thinner than Mickey, he knows how to spread himself out until he’s covering as much surface area of Mickey as he can. The itch isn’t gone but it’s finally appeased by a body against his, by the instinctive feeling that he’s safe, that he’s being taken care of.

He remembers years ago, when he’d done this with Mandy. It makes him feel not like a total bitch, that betas needed this kind of body contact, too. That it isn’t just a sudden new craving for dick (though that isn’t exactly a sudden craving in Mickey’s case), but a normal part of presenting. It was probably less weird as a kid to want to hug everyone and just lay together for awhile than it is for a teenager in his sexual prime, but he’s always known he’s been dealt a shit hand in life.

He’s waiting for Mandy’s call before he sleeps, he promises himself. But his head is against Ian’s chest and he can hear his steady, if elevated, heartbeat and his skin is smooth and warm and freckled, his leg hair prickling against Mickey’s, hands rubbing along Mickey’s sides and back, his nose in Mickey’s hair and breathing like he’s never smelled something so good.

The moment he’d felt the shift in him, smelled the change in scent, he’d wondered if he’d ever be able to sleep again.

Now, in the Gallagher van, with Ian fucking Gallagher surrounding him in both scent and body, he finds that the answer is a very enthusiastic yes.

-

What wakes Mickey isn’t the phone vibrating against the metal of the door but Gallagher shaking him.

“_What_, motherfucker?” he smacks at the hand on his shoulder and it’s only that his body is loose and tired that he doesn’t punch at it, instead.

“Mandy’s on the phone,” Gallagher says and that doesn’t bring him to full awareness but he does manage to stick out a hand and motion for the phone without lifting his head from the warm skin of Gallagher’s chest.

He grunts into the phone when he has it pressed to his free ear, the other listening to that steady beating sound that put him to sleep in the first place. He doesn’t feel hot and desperate anymore, not for sex. Now he just wants to stay like this, maybe get a few more of their clothes and another couple’a sandwiches. There are still chips in the front seat, he remembers. He might be able to reach them with his toes and snag the bag if he tries hard enough.

“Mickey?” Mandy demands, no gentle way about it, “You piece of shit, Mikhailo fucking Milkovich!”

“Bitch, it is -” Mickey cracks an eye open, finally, to check the time and sees that it’s dark out and that’s good enough, “Too fucking early for this, what the fuck do you want?”

“Jamie called me!” Mandy sounds furious, “What, couldn’t bother to send someone looking!? Ian could have crawled the neighborhood for me, I was a station away!”

“Gallagher’s not goin’ nowhere,” Mickey pats Gallagher’s shoulder groggily and Gallagher shrugs in agreement. “‘Sides, I’m fine. I told Jamie.”

“Yeah, well, you should have told _me_, I’m the one in the fucking city! I could have come and been with you! Where even _are_ you right now? The house smells like someone had an orgy!”

“Listen,” Mickey wants to be firm but he’s slipping back to sleep - between the emotional upheaval and the full dinner and the warmth and smell of Gallagher and their stupid little van nest, he’s weak. “Talk to your boyfriend, okay? I can’t even - I’m tired.”

He doesn’t want to think about what the house smells like, or if Terry had noticed or any logistics right now.

“Mickey -” Mandy starts in again, but he just holds the phone back out blindly, going back to burying his face in Gallagher’s skin and he feels it plucked from his fingers. He feels himself getting rearranged, one of his legs pulled up so its across Gallagher’s hips, his now-free arm tucked close to Gallagher’s head and nosed at until Gallagher is satisfied with whatever he’s doing. There’s not an inch of skin along Mickey’s front that isn’t touching Gallagher somewhere and he’s not sure if he’s the one making that pleased, humming noise but it is his sentiments exactly.

“He’s fine, Mands, I promise.” he hears Gallagher say, voice soft. “No, for real, I got him out of the house. We’re just, I dunno. Cuddling right now. He needed some scents and stuff so we holed up together.”

Something strokes the back of Mickey’s neck, light enough not to bother him but firm enough to feel real fuckin’ good and he just...basks. Lays in it and lets himself be the center of Gallagher’s attention. Mickey can hear it in his voice, that he’s distracted while he talks. Because he’s got Mickey, right here and wanting.

“No, Mandy, I am not going to fuck your brother in the middle of him presenting, I’m not some rapist!”

Mickey would take offense, except Gallagher doesn’t even tense at the accusation. They’ve all met plenty of knotheads like that before and the atmosphere is too relaxed for any tension right now.

It feels good, in a far away sort of way, that Mickey’s family is worried about him. Makes him relax even more into Gallagher’s touch.

He doesn’t bother listening to the rest of the conversation. He’s too tired, too soothed. He falls back asleep before the end of the phone call.

-

The next time he wakes, it’s to sunshine blasting him in the face and a tank so full he’s gonna burst if he doesn’t drain it.

He sits up fast enough that he startles Gallagher awake, too, who lets out a pained grunt when Mickey uses his chest as a jumping off point.

“Ow.” He whines even as Mickey scrambles over him to get to the door. He doesn’t even really think about checking if the coast is clear, brain muddled with _gotta piss_ and _so fucking hungry_ and _safe place_. He gets the doors open, stumbles to the other side of the van so he isn’t in plain sight of the house and pisses in the grass with a sigh of relief so great he nearly loses his footing.

“Good morning to you, too.” Gallagher says from the passenger side window, which he’s rolled down.

“Fuck off.” Mickey shakes and then tucks himself back into his boxers, wipes his hands on them - not that it does any good, stiff with dried slick as they are - before turning to give Gallagher a hard look.

He feels - better. Not quite himself, still, but he doesn’t want to jump on a ginger boner as much as yesterday. Or maybe he does, but not quite for the same reasons.

“If I fuck off, who’ll make you breakfast?” Gallagher asks with a grin that should set Mickey’s teeth on edge. Instead, Mickey just narrows his eyes.

“I told you, I’m not walkin’ into that alpha den smellin’ like two-cent breeder whore.”

“First of all,” Gallagher says, “You smell like you’re worth at _least_ fifty bucks.”

He ducks when Mickey lunges at him, saved only by the door between them.

“Better watch your mouth, gingersnap,” Mickey hurls at him, but Gallagher just keeps grinning.

“Besides, my family’s all gone for the day. School and work and shit. You can use the shower, Mandy dropped some clothes off for you last night. I’ll feed you.”

Mickey doesn’t stop with his narrow-eyed look, taking Gallagher and his stupid Prince Charming act in. There’s no bad blood between them except for the whole Kash and Grab thing, but there’s no good blood between them outside of their shared Mandy connection.

“You got a thing for weak-ass breeders?” he finally settles on, opening the door to crawl back into the van. Gallagher’s moved the chips to the dash and Mickey ignores them in favor of getting into the back and curling up around all of the comforting clothes and sheets again.

“Nah,” Gallagher shrugs, “Just a good guy, I guess.”

“Good guys don’t live around here, dick breath.”

“Then maybe I’ve got a thing for guys who can beat me up.” Gallagher shoots him another wild smile and it doesn’t take Mickey’s fuckin’ breath away or nothin’ but it does make his chest go kinda warm in a way he’s never really felt before.

“Come on, Milkovich,” Gallagher reaches back to slap his leg, “Get a sweater on and I’ll make pancakes while you shower. Mandy left your clothes in the bushes or something. I’ll find ‘em for you.”

“What’s the point of getting dressed?” Mickey finds himself grumbling even as he roots around for the sweater Gallagher brought back the second go around. It’s about his size and he’d guess it was Lip’s except that it smells almost exclusively like Ian and maybe the littlest alpha bitch. “I’m just gonna soak through everything again. Jesus, I owe you some quarters for the ‘mat or some shit.”

He’s leaked onto a few of the things they slept on during the night, definitely the comforter and Lip’s pillow - he’s not too guilty about that one, though.

“Mandy snuck out your sheets, too.” Gallagher looks him over and there, that look, it’s not a leer but it is kind of hungry. It makes Mickey feel better, somehow. Ian isn’t doing this out of the kindness of his heart. He’s an alpha and, right now, Mickey is a breeder in need. He _wants_ Mickey right now and he’d fight another knothead for him, probably. He would have fought Terry for him yesterday.

“She already washed ‘em. I’ll wash everything here once you’re, you know, settled.”

“And how long’ll that take?” Mickey tugs on those fuzzy socks from last night because he wants to and he knows Ian won’t say shit about it. Probably gets off on Mickey wearing his shit.

“Maybe a day or two more. Mandy said she can stay with you tonight if you -”

“No.” Mickey shakes his head before he can even finish. He doesn’t want Mandy, or any of his brothers, seeing him like this. _Smelling_ him like this. It’s bad e-fucking-nough he’s gotta rely on Red Riding Hood here without involving the rest of them.

“Okay.” Gallagher shrugs again, like it doesn’t matter to him either way. But he looks relieved, like he hadn’t wanted Mandy to take his place, and that settles in Mickey’s chest, too.

“Okay.” He repeats, firmer, and then crawls out of the van again at a more sedate pace. Gallagher wraps his scarf around Mickey’s face again, just in case, and then they slowly make their way up the back stairs and to the door.

The coast is clear so Gallagher brings him up to the shower, reminds him not to give himself hypothermia even if the cold water feels good, and leaves him alone.

It’s the first time he’s really been on his own since this all started. There was the time that Ian left him to go clear the van out, but he’d been so focused on keeping up straight and his hunger that he hadn’t had much time to just. Think.

Standing in the lukewarm water - because the cold _did_ feel so good against his heated skin but it was also fucking winter and the Gallaghers had no heat - gives him a few minutes to just process.

He needs to plan. He needs _a_ plan.

Instead, he leans over to get this embarrassment over with and uses the bar of soap he finds to scrub at the dried flakes of slick across his ass and thighs and everywhere in between. He washes his hair with the cheap stuff that reminds him of how Gallagher smells and then scrubs himself down one more time just because. The water is getting cooler by the time he’s finished so he turns the shower off and then dries off with a towel he finds on the floor.

He avoids looking at himself in the mirror, just slicks his hair back with his hand and wraps the towel around his waist before opening the door into the cool house. It hits him like a punch, the cold air coming in as the steam escapes, but it feels like a _good_ punch. He kind of wants to wallow in it.

Instead, he picks up his boxers and Ian’s socks and goes to find his wayward knothead.

Gallagher is in the kitchen, flipping pancakes. There’s a folded pile of clothes Mickey recognizes at his laying on the table and he bee-lines for them without a word. Drops his towel and gets dressed in the middle of the kitchen and feels more like himself when he’s got a shirt and some sturdy jeans and a fresh pair of boxers on.

He kicks the towel into the corner and then goes to see what Gallagher is doing. If he presses himself up under one of Ian’s arms when he gets there, that’s no one’s business, not even his own.

Gallagher lets him, doesn’t even laugh as he loops an arm around his waist and flips the last pancake one-handed.

“Good shower?” he asks.

“Fuck off.” Mickey grumbles back and picks up one of the pancakes to eat dry. As soon as the food touches his tongue, he’s ravenous.

“Go sit,” Gallagher nudges him when his stomach growls, “I’ll bring everything over. Get some fuckin’ sugar and shit in you. Hydration.”

It makes sense that Mickey probably needs to drink as much water as possible right now. Between leaking and pissing, he’s probably got rid of that full gallon from last night plus whatever beer he’s chugged in the last week. He goes without argument because he’s not got the energy for it after standing in the shower and getting dressed and chewing.

Gallagher brings him a full stack of pancakes, enough to feed the full Milkovich brood during one of their lean periods, and drops a glass of water, a glass of orange juice and a banana right next to the plate. There’s even syrup.

“If anyone asks,” Gallagher says like they’re conspiring, “Blame Carl. He’s always stealing food to lure shit into his traps.”

“I don’t give a fuck.” Mickey says succinctly and then digs in with candor.

They’re both from the same place and they both know what it’s like. They eat like someone’s gonna snatch the food right out of their mouths - because that’s happened to ‘em both before - and there’s no more talking until the pancakes are all gone and the banana has been eaten and both glasses have been drained.

Mickey feels impossibly full. He’s sure if he looked down, his stomach would be bulging right now. He knows this isn’t how the Gallaghers usually eat, but he finds himself jealous, anyway. Even if his dad wouldn’t sign his death warrant the moment he sniffed out the truth, there’s no way Mickey would have got this five-star treatment if he’d presented at home. It makes him feel defensive and angry, like he wants to beat Ian up for being nice to show him what happens when he waves this kinda shit around people like Mickey Milkovich.

Instead, he leans back in his chair and rests his hands on his extended belly and sighs contently.

“You should drink more water, probably.” Gallagher says but it’s more of a suggestion than an order and that’s why Mickey nods. Gallagher cleans up their dishes - which means he puts them all in the sink and scrubs down the hot plate he’d used to make the pancakes - and then brings Mickey another two glasses of water and orange juice. Mickey drinks them without complaint.

He’s exhausted by the time he finishes the drinks and things kind of blur after that. Gallagher gets him back to the van, Mickey rearranges to his liking and then drags Gallagher back down after stripping them both to their boxers again. It adds new clothes to his pile and Mickey can’t complain about that.

He sleeps, head to Gallagher’s heartbeat, while Gallagher reads or what the fuck ever he wants to do that doesn’t involve moving from under Mickey, and that’s how they pass the day.

Gallagher can barely wake him up to feed him again twice more - a granola bar sometime in the afternoon and then a bowl of beans and rice at night. He gets him to drink more, maybe, but Mickey honestly can’t remember much.

Only that he hears Ian’s heartbeat through most of the day and night, that he feels a hand stroking his spine, dancing along the knobs poking through thin skin.

-

When he wakes up properly next, he feels - normal. Or, maybe, a new normal. He smells himself, still, but it isn’t as overpowering, and he can _think_ again, which is - nice. It’s nice.

Gallagher is still sleeping. He looks small and innocent like this, mouth open, face relaxed. He’d splayed out so Mickey could touch his fill, get whatever he wanted from him while they slept. It’s still dark out, but the sun is starting to rise and the cold is seeping back into his bones. Was this how cold Gallagher was the whole time they were out here?

He gathers up what he can without moving too much - the sweater he knows is Gallagher’s but can’t stop himself from taking anyway, the sturdy jeans Mandy brought, a jacket he can’t figure out the owner of because it smells so much like both of them. He doesn’t bother with boxers, just carefully crawls over Gallagher, opens the door as quietly as he can, dresses in the still morning.

He looks at the van one last time, at Gallagher still sleeping spread out and bared. He can’t stop himself from leaning over, dragging the edge of the comforter up so it covers Ian.

He takes the fuzzy socks, too, and finds his boots in the driver’s seat. He closes the door, slow and quiet so he doesn’t wake up - anyone.

And then he stuffs his feet in his boots, balls the socks up in his pocket, and leaves before the sunlight touches the Gallagher house.

-

His house is dark and silent even though the sun is up by the time he walks in. Terry is passed out on the couch, same place Mickey left him two days ago but with a refreshed beer and bowl of chips on the table in front of him.

Mandy’s door is wide open.

His stomach drops, dread pooling as he scurries past his closed door and to her’s.

She’s sleeping soundly in bed, blankets and pillows in the same amount of array she always has them in. She doesn’t look - different. Not defensive in her sleep.

He hasn’t slept in Mandy’s bed since before she even presented. It was always her space, the only safe place in the house for her when the wood was in place.

She doesn’t open her eyes, but she lifts up her arm and she wasn’t asleep after all. Probably hadn’t slept at all last night, left her door open for him.

He closes the door, puts the wood in place. He collapses into her, curls up into her arms as tight and tiny as he can get, feels his eyes burn but doesn’t cry. Refuses to fucking cry.

“You smell.” She says, voice raspy.

“Better than you, bitch.” He snarks back, but his voice cracks and she holds him tighter.

Neither of them sleep, not when Terry wakes up and stomps around yelling about where the fuck Mickey’s been, god _damn it_, he has a fuckin’ job to run with Terry at four, not when the front door finally closes and they can relax just a little. Not until she digs the beta cologne out from her bedside table and dabs it all over him; neck, wrists, behind his ears, pits. She doesn’t stop until the smell is choking them both, and then she puts it away and they finally pass out together.

-

He gives Kash’s gun to Mandy to give to Gallagher and she does it with an understanding sort of air that he doesn’t fuckin’ appreciate.

He isn’t _avoiding_ Gallagher. Mickey doesn’t fucking avoid anyone.

He’s just...keeping his distance. Deciding his next move.

-

His next move ends up with him bent over in the back room of the Kash and Grab while Gallagher plows him. He _had_ told Mickey to call him when he’d settled, after all.

“If you knot me, I’ll cut your fuckin’ dick off,” he warns, the threat real even if he sounds more like he’s begging for a knot than threatening it.

“We’re in the back room of my work, Mick,” Ian chides, in that fucking way he does like his words are supposed to just _imply_ something. He leans over Mickey until his back is completely covered, one hand on Mickey’s hip and the other going to wrap around the fist Mickey’s got on the shelving unit he’s getting pounded against. “If you ever let me knot you, I’m not gonna do it this fuckin’ pit.”

And, see. It’s not much, but it says something about Mickey’s life that it’s definitely the most romantic thing he’s ever fuckin’ heard in his life, let alone the most romantic thing ever said to _him_, like Gallagher gives a fuck where he gets to knot Mickey. Mickey ducks his head, bites down on his (Ian’s) scarf to hide his groans as Ian goes back to making him see stars and tries to forget that line.

-

There are no breeders in the system; not in Juvie, not in prison. Being a breeder is like painting a target on your back; you step into that hole with those people knowing you get wet every couple months and you don’t come back out the same.

When you go in, you’re labeled a beta. Technically, Mickey’s legally already a beta, because like fuck is he gonna go through all the trouble of living as one just to get some junk in the mail that outs him to Terry, but he’s extra sure that he’s labeled right when he gets processed. So when he goes to Juvie, he’s a beta and the only time he says otherwise is when he very quietly explains his situation to the kindly nurse who supplies him the kind of heat suppressants that south side trash like him could never afford. The thought of his first heat happening within _these_ walls is almost worse than it happening within his own house’s.

Ian visits him. He doesn’t do, say, anything that might give him away, but Mickey can see the strain of his jaw, the way his chin juts. He’s not happy about the glass that separates them. That he can smell alpha all over him even through the blockade. Mickey can see that he’s _jealous_.

And, hey, on one hand Ian has literally been fucking Kash - the bitch beta that _shot_ Mickey over a Snickers bar - since he was in the goddamn cradle. On the other hand, it makes Mickey feel...good. It makes him feel good that Ian had gone after Kash with a furocity that bordered on homicidal the second that bullet had hit Mickey, that he’d only stopped because Mickey had needed him, not because Kash would have died if he’d kept going. If Mickey were a weaker man, he’d preen because he’d bet that Ian would fight a lot of people over Mickey’s ass.

Not that Mickey _needs_ him to. He can take care of himself. It’s more that he’s never really had someone give a shit about him like that, even if it’s just because he’s a good fuck and Gallagher’s got some thing about _courting_ him or some shit, like they’re in a romance novel. Like Terry wouldn’t kill them both dead if he caught a whiff of that shit.

“Take your hand off the glass,” he has to say when Ian forgets himself and Ian drops it immediately, but he’s still fucking _smiling_, like Mickey has said something, done something, to encourage that dangerous shit.

Mickey really will rip his tongue out of his head if he says he _misses_ him again, but...he’d be a little sad about it, probably. It’s a talented tongue, after all.

-

Mandy and Ian come to pick him up. Mandy gives them both a knowing smirk as soon as Ian drapes an arm over his shoulder and, sure, Mickey has to shove him off almost immediately but - there’s a second where that smell hits him and it’s so good, it’s been _lacking_ so frustratingly from Mickey’s life since he went away. He wants it to stay for a long, long time.

They have to take the subway to get back home and it’s a long ride. They get the car alone for a couple stops half-way there and Mandy drops off into a deep sleep that she only seems to fall into when Mickey is around. Her head is resting on his bag of clothes since he didn’t bother changing into them and her feet are in his lap and Ian is sitting in the seat next to him, just a little too close.

He needs to talk about it now, while they have the time, he guesses. He’s been giving it a lot of thought since the nurse talked to him about it in the solitude of their last meeting. He took his last suppressors before he left her office and he figures he’s got a month, maybe a handful, before things go ass over tea kettle for him. He’s pushed it off so long now it’s unnatural and she warned it’ll hit hard and mean. He’s got the warning signs memorized, but he needs to get the ducks in a row.

“So,” he says into the quiet of the running train.

“So.” Ian repeats, giving him his undivided attention. If he had his way, Mickey would probably be covered in him already.

“I was taking suppressants in the clink.” he says calmly, trying to go for smooth.

Ian blinks. “You haven’t even had your first heat, yet, though. Right?” And there’s something in his voice, almost like he’s begging Mickey to confirm what they both already know.

“Yeah,” he shrugs because it’s no big deal. “I probably would have while I was in there, though, so the nurse snuck me the suppressants for awhile if I helped her out with some shit.”

“How are you gonna get ‘em now?” Ian gets straight to the point, voice dropping. He knows how important this is to Mickey, or at least sounds like he does. Mickey can doubt a lot of things, but even he can’t doubt that when Ian commits, he fuckin’ commits.

“I ain’t gonna get ‘em now, gingerbread.” Mickey bites back and, like always, Ian lets his tone roll right off his shoulders. If the Milkovich siblings all pooled their cash every couple weeks, they wouldn’t be able to afford suppressants like what Mickey needs, even if Mickey could find a source. ‘Sides, his brothers have all been...distant lately. Like they know what’s coming, that Mickey won’t have much time left and want to be able to have plausible deniability when Terry finds out. “You know what that means?”

Ian nods, because of course he does. It means heat. _Mickey’s_ heat.

“Your brother’s fucked every breeder this side of the country.” Mickey looks at his hands, wrapped tight around Mandy’s ankles. He rubs one thumb slowly over her skin, prickly where she hasn’t shaved in a couple days, and pale. “Think he could get his hands on some post-heat pills?”

“Jesus,” Ian sits back, knocks his head against the wall.

“Jesus _you_, motherfucker!” Mickey hisses back, “Like you’re the one risking gettin’ knocked up by that ball of floaters you’re packin’!”

“Me?” Ian sits straight again, snapping to look at him with those dark eyes Mickey really only sees in the bedroom.

“Yes, _you_, fuckhead, who the fuck _else_ am I gonna fuck!?” he says, a little louder than he maybe means to, because Ian gets him so damn worked up all the goddamn time. He’s bigger, now. Went through a growth spurt while Mickey was behind walls and he’s so damn tall. Taller and broader than Mickey by a bit and ROTC has been doing his arms all sorts of wonders. Mickey would have chosen him even before, when he was a bean pole with floppy red hair, because Mickey can admit that Ian’s the only knothead he’s ever even considered, but he can’t say that the change is _unwelcome_ either.

“If you’re sittin’ here accusing _me_ of lining up knotheads while I’ve been locked up ‘cause _you’re_ crazy goddamn boyfriend _shot me_, I’ll rip that knot right out of your goddamn pants and your balls with it -”

Ian kisses him. Grabs his face in both of those fuckin’ meat paws he calls hands and turns Mickey’s face up from where he’d been glaring at the carpeted floor and kisses him. The car is empty and Mandy is asleep but it’s their first kiss and Mickey doesn’t really know what to do with it except carefully, slowly, lift a hand to the back of Ian’s head, fist his short hair and let himself be kissed for five - eight - ten - fifteen seconds before he rips Ian away by the roots of his hair.

“What the _fuck_, Gallagher!?”

“Sorry,” Ian breathes hard, eyes dilated and cheeks pink and still staring at Mickey’s lips, “I know, no kissing, sorry,”

“Fuck sorry, fuckin’ - you don’t do that shit in _public_, Ian! You tryin’a get us fuckin’ bashed!?”

“Public, huh?” Ian blinks again, finally looks like he’s coming back to himself. He grins; that slow, soppy one that makes Mickey’s heart do weird things and Mickey just barely holds back from slugging it off his face.

“Or private,” Mickey warns darkly, but it’s too late and they both know it.

“No, Mick. I know you haven’t been fucking other people like that.” and he sounds so sincere when he says it that Mickey relents and lets his hair go. He’s _trusting_ Ian to keep his tongue in his goddamn mouth so Mickey doesn’t have to bite it off.

“And you?” Mickey finds himself asking, “How many fags you sniff out while I’ve been off the market?”

“Not Kash.” Ian says immediately and Mickey finds himself relaxing. He doesn’t care if Ian fucks around, not really, but if he’s still fucking around with the guy who _shot_ Mickey, they’re gonna have problems. “Not...anyone, really. Tried, I guess, but...no one smells like you.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” Mickey scoffs, “Of course no one _smells like me_. I’m the only one that smells like me.”

“Yeah.” Ian says and the grin turns goofy.

“Just. Shut the fuck up, Christ.” Mickey shoves at him but Ian doesn’t move an inch and Mickey kind of likes that.

They stay quiet. Mandy sniffles in her sleep and Mickey smoothes her skirt out without thinking, pulling it a little lower. It’s just he and Ian in the car but still.

“I’ll get the pills, Mick.” Ian leans over until he’s practically resting his head on Mickey’s, the three of them so wrapped up together it’ll probably look like a really weird picture if someone walks in, but Mickey doesn’t push him off this time. He smells good. “And I’ll get the suppressors, too. If you want them.”

“Bullshit, you’ll get the suppressors,” Mickey sneers, “Those things cost more than my life is even worth for a dose.”

“That’s not true,” Ian says fiercely, still quiet, in that intense way that he sometimes says things to Mickey. “You’re worth ‘em. If you want ‘em, I’ll get ‘em for you. Okay?”

“...just,” Mickey swallows and slowly, so slowly it’s almost painful, lets his head rest on Ian’s shoulder, “Get the after-heat pills for now, okay? I can’t hold it off forever. Nurse said it’d fuck me up. I’m already gonna have a fucked up time.”

“Okay.” Ian strokes his arm, the one holding Mandy’s ankle, the other coming up to slip around Mickey’s shoulders. They won’t stay like this for long, definitely not by the time they hit the next stop, but Mickey figures a pellet to the thigh can get him this little moment, at the very least. “Just the after-heat pills, for now. We’ll take care of it, okay? You don’t gotta be scared.”

“I ain’t fuckin’ scared, bitch.” Mickey says, even though his voice shakes at the thought of the oncoming heat. What if it hits when he’s at home alone with Terry? Or if he’s out of town on a job? With one of Terry’s buddies or at the goddamn store or -

“I know.” Ian noses at his temple, a ghost of a kiss to his hairline, “Maybe I’m scared for you, okay? But we’ll take care of it.”

“Okay.” Mickey shrugs, because there’s nothing else he can do except shrug. Mandy shifts in her sleep, slowly starting to wake as the next station comes up and the two of them detangle, add inches of space between their bodies as Mandy sits up and, with a dirty look at Mickey, hikes her skirt back up to where it started out.

-

Frank catches them.

Mickey can douse himself in enough beta cologne to make people a street over sick from the smell but nothing’ll cover up the scent of him when he’s taking it and Frank _catches them_ and then they fight and Mickey still hasn’t had his first heat but he can’t let Terry find out. He _can’t_ let Terry find out. Not like this. His brothers are down to help him out, even if he doesn’t explain why.

He’s going - crazy. His head is hot and his eyes are fucking up and his chest is so tight he can’t fucking breathe, he hasn’t had the energy to shave or do even the bare minimum of hygene. He wants to hole up in his room or go back to that fucking van with Ian or whatever and just _be_.

Instead, he’s gotta kidnap and strangle a loose lipped old breeder snooping where he shouldn’t have been. Ian doesn’t get it, he doesn’t understand that Terry will literally rip Mickey inside out or sell him or use him and _then _sell him or _both_; or maybe he does know and he just doesn’t care. Maybe he knows the fuckin’ risks Mickey has been taking, the edge he’s been walking since he was twelve goddamn years old and just doesn’t care. What’s Mickey but another breeder on the streets of Chicago?

He’s gonna kill Frank, he is, on that dark street while Frank’s fucked up - but then he thinks of Ian, imagines what he’d feel like knowing that the omega he’s been watching out for since he’d first presented ended up knocking off his fuckin’ dad, and he can’t do it. Mickey broke his own damn rule, he _cares_ about some no-balls knothead. He can’t go home, either, though. Not without knowing who Frank’s run his mouth to. He could be walking right into Terry’s hands.

Instead, he punches a cop in the face and gets hauled back to Juvie.

“When was your heat?” the familiar nurse frowns at him, looking over his records. “You look like shit. Are you pre-heating right now, Milkovich?”

“Fuckin’ recoverin’, actually.” He lies and takes the suppressants she hands him without blinking.

-

His body _hurts_. God, it fucking hurts. He aches and aches and aches and can’t eat or drink but he has to pretend he’s fine because if someone smells weakness then it’s all for nothing. He doesn’t know why his body is being such a bitch about the suppressants this time around.

He gamely chews his rock-hard bread and he punches assholes and gets punched for being an asshole and he falls in with the family he’s got behind these same bars and hopes they don’t smell it on him past the suppressants and the beta scent he traded every dime in his commissary account for. He doesn’t think about Ian because _fuck him_ and thinking about him makes something deep in Mickey’s core - like his physical body - _hurt_.

He’s so tired. He takes his suppressants every two weeks and feels sicker each time and just guzzles down cell wine until he can pretend it’s the hangover and not what he’s beginning to think it really is. It’s months he spends like this and not once does he see Ian or hear from him and he’s fuckin’ fine with that. He’s a pussy, anyway, and not the kinda alpha Mickey’d accept, as it turns out. Not one that would actually protect him when it came down to it. Not one he can fucking trust.

He spends a couple days in the nurse’s office, by her orders and not his giving in. He might be a breeder but he ain’t a pussy. She says he’s got the flu.

Her name, he finally bothers to learn, is Roseanne.

“Let me guess,” Roseanne sighs, looking over his charts again, “You never had that heat, huh?”

“Sure I did.” Mickey lies with a grimace and puts the ice bag back on his face so he doesn’t have to talk anymore. He’s so over fucking heated.

“Yeah, okay, hun,” She pats his leg through his jumpsuit and it burns. “You need the hospital.”

“That’ll be my first stop when I get outta here.”

“I’m serious, kid. This is _deadly_ stuff, not fun and games. You shouldn’t have been taking suppressants during a pre-heat. You know you’ve probably screwed your body up so bad you’ll be lucky if your heat doesn't kill you.”

“Had better shit to do than leak all over some bitch’s knot,” he lifts the bag again, “Ma’am.”

She’s frustrated and he can see it but there’s nothing she can really do about it. There are no omegas in the system - and even if she could call the codeword to get him admitted for biological reasons, he’s legally a beta and there’d be all sorts of paperwork and investigations and Mickey would fight it every step of the way.

She doesn’t have the authority to hold him and he has the strength to walk himself right out of that building all over again; maybe Mickey reminds her of her dead brother or somethin’ because she has enough authority _somewhere_ to get his case pulled and his parole sped up for overcrowding, at least. One last favor, maybe, before she washes her hands of him.

She doesn’t give him a final dose though, shakes her head when he casually asks, and it leaves him with a pit when he gets out to see only Mandy this time.

“You smell -” She starts and then doesn’t let him go from the tight hug, “Oh, shit, Mickey.”

“Yep,” Mickey pushes her off, “Haven’t showered in a couple weeks. Shive one guy and that’s the first privilege revoked.”

“Don’t act stupid,” she grabs his wrist hard as they walk, nails digging into the skin and he manages to hold back the flinch with every ounce of strength in him.

“‘fuck you worrying about?” He twists out of her grip and shoves his hands in his pocket. He’s already soaked through his tank with sweat. “I just need some fuckin’ beer and a burger and I’ll be fine.”

“You need more than that, Mick.” She starts in and he glares sharply enough that she drops it.

He gets the beer and he gets the burger but it’s at Iggy and Jamie’s place because he can’t go home or to the Alibi smelling like he does. He’s past the point of really worrying about humiliation in front of his brothers - he’s hungry and tired as fuck and hurts all over and the smell of family isn’t exactly what he needs but damn if it doesn’t help.

“Never knew a breeder could go this long without gushin’.” Iggy says around his beer and Mickey nails him so hard in the arm with a fist - the other he’s got wrapped around the burger - that he flops out of his seat with a shout and spills the beer all over his face.

“Prob'ly never got your ass kicked by one ‘til now, too, if you keep openin’ your fuckin’ trap,” he snarls back and then stuffs his face with the rest of the burger or risk grinding his teeth down into nubs in frustration. He’s wearing one of Jamie’s jackets over Joey’s gross-ass soccer jersey and he’s got some of Iggy’s pants on, those fingerless gloves Colin loves so much and he’s wrapped one of Mandy’s scarfs around his neck even though it’s hot as balls right now. He’s trying to drown himself in the familiar family smell in the hopes of maybe...tricking his body or something. It wants to make a family? He’s got one right fuckin’ here, no need to go looking for a breeding.

He smells fucking awful, but here’s to hoping.

“Just go call Ian.” Mandy whines for what might be the hundredth time since she picked him up.

“Mands,” Mickey says with no small amount of patience, “I will personally lay me down across the goddamn tracks before I let that ginger bitch near me.”

“You’re going into _heat_, Mickey, who _else_ are you gonna call!?”

“A goddamn funeral director, fuck off!” he throws a bag of chips at her and she catches them mutinously, stuffs a handful into her mouth.

“He really the only knothead you fucked around with?” Jamie says dubiously from where he’s safely stationed himself on the couch. Mickey knows he did it so he could keep his distance from Mickey but can’t decide if it’s because he doesn’t want Mickey taking a swing at him for a verbal misstep or because he doesn’t want to catch breeder cooties.

“Yes,” Mickey grinds out, “What other dudes ‘round here am I gonna go with, huh?” Especially when dick gets all his damn omega senses tingling and his body gives his damn presentation away. He misses the Before Times, when he could have fucked without regard for his own ass giving him away. Now, all he has are the toys he’s collected over the months, and those ain’t gonna do him any fuckin’ good right now.

“I dunno,” Colin takes the rest of Iggy’s burger since he’s still lying on the floor, too stoned to really move after getting laid out. “Maybe you should call him. That or the hospital, right?”

“I’ll take six feet under.” Mickey rolls his eyes, “You know what they do to fucks like me in the hospital? Stuff us full of drugs and sell us while we’re out of our minds. No fuckin’ thanks, I’ll pass on my Kill Bill backstory.”

“Ian -”

“Is not a _fuckin’_ option, Mandy, so drop it!”

And the silence falls heavy. Mickey doesn’t let it bother him and just keeps stuffing his face. He’s hungry now that the suppressants have left his system just enough and he recognizes the kind of heat that they’d been keeping at bay for so long now. As a last meal, burnt burgers and off-brand chips ain’t a bad one in his family. He’s pretty sure his third cousin got half a baked potato before getting offed so he’s already ahead.

“You can always go crawling.” Iggy finally speaks up.

“You want our brother trolling the streets for a John to spend his first damn heat with?” Jamie sits up but Iggy only shrugs.

“I mean, he don’t want a hospital, he’s man enough not to go belly up for a pussy bitch that couldn’t even stake a claim long enough to get it in ‘em right, what other option is there? It’s just a fuckin’ heat, right?”

“...right.” Mickey agrees slowly, licking mustard off his thumb thoughtfully, “It’s just fuckin’. Not like I gotta marry the dude.”

“Exactly. Can probably make some good dough, too, if you smell good enough to get a fight goin’.” Iggy lifts a fist and Mickey, trying desperately to remember that this was family and he couldn’t kill family, knocks his fist against Iggy’s.

“You can’t be serious.” Mandy stares at him, and then Iggy and then Jamie and then Colin and then Joey, back and forth and back and forth, “For fucking real, guys? You want Mickey to sell himself to a _John_ for a heat that’s gonna be so bad it could kill him? What if something goes wrong, huh? What if you need a doctor or you pass out and don’t wake up because he’s not fuckin’ feeding you or -”

“I wanna fuck, Mandy, I’m not a fuckin’ animal.” Mickey stands up, chair scraping along cheap linoleum, “I don’t need a goddamn dog sitter, I need a knot to sit on for a couple days so I can move on with my goddamn life!”

“Jamie!” Mandy turns to Jamie like he’s gonna change Mickey’s mind somehow.

Jamie, slowly, shrugs. “It’s his decision, Mands.”

“What, you’re all about the right to choose _now_!? A couple weeks ago you were bitching about how you wanted to go back to when omegas got sold off as property!”

Mickey turns to glare and is able to confirm that Jamie sat away to avoid a swing because he is shaking his head.

“I was joking!” He puts his hands up, “Mick, you do whatever you fuckin’ want, yeah? We’ll get - what, you need those pills, right? After-heat pills?”

“What if you get picked up by a serial murderer!” Mandy throws her chip bag at Jamie, scattering the rest across the room and missing him by a mile in her tantrum, “Or he locks you up to, like, start his own fuckin’ weirdo cult family or he tries to claim you or he kidnaps you or he -”

“Fucks ‘em until he’s not hot anymore and lets him go on his merry way?” Iggy chimes in and Mickey uses the distraction of Mandy stomping him hard with her platform boot to slip out of the apartment while Joey heckles the rest of his siblings.

-

He dips out of the jacket and scarf at the door because he doesn’t need it where he’s going and tries to think as he makes his way down to the ground floor. His brothers don’t live far, a half hour’s walk from their childhood hole and he thinks about what he needs if he’s gonna go crawling.

Different clothes, probably. A real shower to wash off the beta cologne and the scent of all his brothers and his sister. Every single condom in his drawer because he doesn’t trust any of his stupid siblings to remember the absolute essential that is the after-heat pill. Some money - enough for a week of motel time and some food. Definitely a pack of smokes and every joint and pill Iggy’s hidden in the Milkovich house to get through the next couple days with some guy and his tennis ball dick.

It’s approaching nightfall and he knows he doesn’t have too much time left to himself. He’d estimate...by the middle of the night he’d be begging every Tom, Dick, and Harry (or all three) to get on him. He picks up the pace; Boystown isn’t _so_ far off but he doesn’t wanna risk losing it on the train and he’s still gotta find a John and negotiate and shit.

Terry’s usually at the bar this time of day and, if he isn’t, Mickey will just say he just got off with an omega, that’s why he smells so rank right now. Newly freed and already fuckin’ breeder tail; that would make Terry proud. Maybe get him to leave Mickey alone long enough to get everything he needs and escape.

He’s thinking of his best action plan as he walks past the familiar rusted gate of his house, turns to head up the steps and nearly stumbles right over a sleeping life-sized Raggedy Andy doll.

Ian’s managed to grow even more since they last saw each other. His arms look like they could squash a melon and his hair is buzzed short but his freckles are still faintly there if Mickey squints in the flickering lamplight.

He kicks him, probably hard enough to bruise.

“Fuck you doin’ here, Ronald McDonald?” He sidesteps as Ian tumbles down the steps and lands in a pile of long limbs and shocked noises.

“Waitin’ for you,” Ian blinks up at him, turning over to lay out flat on the ground.

“Keep crawlin’ down there and you’re gonna get tetanus.” Mickey warns, only half paying him any attention. He steps over Ian’s torso, hops up the steps to the front door and jerks the knob up to get inside.

No one’s home, thank Christ, so he heads straight for his room.

“Mick - Mickey, come on, wait!”

Ignoring Gallagher has always been easy on the surface level. Mickey can go hours without hearing a single word the fucker says, but he can’t go a second without just - _sensing_ him. How close he is, how he smells, how he sounds if not what he’s saying.

It’s unfortunate that his time away and current predicament haven’t cured that in him. He knows almost instinctively when Ian stops in his doorway and starts to watch him as he digs out some clothes he hasn’t worn in so long that they just smell musty and like him instead of like his family, as he pulls out his emergency money from the sock drawer and his weed and the pills Iggy stashed under his mattress and then the box of condoms he’s pretty sure aren’t expired yet.

“What are you doing?”

He doesn’t even think about responding, just grabs a bag and stuffs the money and drugs and condoms inside and then a change of clothes just in case something happens to what he’s gonna go out in.

He doesn’t bother shutting the door when he goes to take a shower, knows Ian is still watching as he strips down and gets under the freezing water. It takes at least ten minutes to heat up properly but the water bill goes through the roof if they all spend an hour waiting for some good water temperature in this shit hole so he just scrubs his hair and body with a bar of soap.

His thighs feel sticky when he knuckles at them and he swipes between his cheeks enough to scowl at how grossly wet it already is back there. Christ.

“Mick, seriously,” Ian sighs from the other side of the curtain, “Mandy called.”

“And?” Mickey snorts and spits soapy water into the shower, washes the suds out of his face and hair and blindly reaches out as he turns the water off. Ian sighs again and hands him a towel, kinda stale with previous use, not that Mickey cares. He dries off, wraps the towel around his waist and steps out. Ian is sitting on the toilet, watching him with those serious, stupidly pretty eyes of his.

“I’m sorry.” Ian tries but Mickey just scowls at him, turns to leave the bathroom and gets caught by two giant fucking hands on his hips, gripping the towel tight to stop him.

“Ay!” Mickey smacks at him, “Hands off the fuckin’ merch, Pippy Longstocking, I ain’t got the time to listen to you beg right now!”

“You’re not seriously gonna go sell yourself, Mick.” Ian doesn’t let go even when Mickey does turn around, if only to punch at his shoulder in warning.

“I’m gonna do whatever the hell I want. ‘S not like I’ve got some Prince Charming just waitin’ to sweep me off my goddamn feet.”

Ian looks hurt. “You said you’d spend it with _me_.”

“Yeah, and you said you’d kill my dad if he tried to take me from you, remember that? Story changes when it’s _you’re_ fuckin’ sperm doner on the line, though, huh?” Mickey does finally lash out, clawing at his face hard enough that Ian flinches back and lets go of his towel. It falls around his ankles and Mickey takes his chance to escape the tiny bathroom and return to the safety of his own room, where his clothes are waiting.

They’re not exactly sex-inspiring, but they’re loose and clean enough. He drags the shirt on and doesn’t bother with boxers.

“‘Sides,” He continues as Ian comes skulking out of the bathroom, “When am I ever gonna get a cash cow like this, huh? Fresh breeder ass, right here, baby!” He hops to pull his pants up and then zips and buttons, “Never before touched.”

“_I’ve_ touched,” Ian says, like Mickey needs reminding.

“Not while I’ve been wet, firecrotch,” Mickey says back and if it’s vicious, it’s meant to be. “Missed your chance there.”

Ian juts his chin out, face going all tense with frustration. It’s probably that knothead pride, all bruised ego because the breeder he’s been courting is rejecting him.

“How much are you even gonna settle for, huh? How much is a stranger’s dick in you while you’re out of your mind worth?”

“Dunno.” Mickey sniffs his pits and then grabs a stick of deodorant he’s pretty sure was Colin’s back when he still lived here to rub on, “What’s tail go for on the streets? Hundred for a fuck? I’ll double that.”

“You’re gonna sell yourself for _two hundred bucks_!?” Ian nearly hits the roof, face going all splotchy and red with indignation.

“Hey,” Mickey shrugs, pulling his bag over his arms to settle it across his shoulders, “I was gonna give it up for free a couple months ago. I’d say my business sense is improving with every decision I make. You think some knothead won’t jump at that?”

He brushes past Ian, who seems too lost for words to shoot back. Terry still isn’t back yet and he’s not sure when his next meal is gonna come so he grabs a couple pieces of bread and a slice of Kraft’s cheese from the fridge for the road.

When he turns back around, Ian’s standing in his way.

“Move, Gallagher.” Mickey grunts, starting to lose his patience, “I don’t got the time to fuck around with you right now. I’m losing nightlight.”

“Two-fifty.”

“...what?”

“Two-fifty, Milkovich.”

“Two-fifty _what_?”

“I’m a knothead jumping at it and I’m telling you two hundred and fifty bucks in your hand right now if you spend the heat with me.”

“...you fucking with me?”

Ian doesn’t break eye contact as he twists his hand into his back packet, yanks out his wallet and hands the whole thing over without even opening it up. “Just got paid, there’s fuckin’ - four hundred in there and some weed I was gonna sell for Lip.”

“Is this a bribe or are you buying me right now?”

“Whichever one works.” Ian shrugs.

“I’m not taking your goddamn money, Ian.” Mickey tries to shove the wallet back at him, feeling - somehow grosser than he had before he’d taken the shower. Ian won’t take it, just pushes it right back to his chest.

“What, I’m not good enough? Last time I checked, you couldn’t get enough of me.”

“That was when I thought you were a real alpha.” Mickey finally just drops the wallet and it hits the ground with a dull thud.

“Jesus Christ, Mickey, I didn’t want you to go back to Juvie! I don’t care about _Frank_, I don’t care about Terry, I don’t care about _anyone else_! I would have protected you, I swear to God!”

“A little fuckin’ late for that now, shithead!” Mickey shoves him back, trying to get around him - he doesn’t have fucking _time_ for this. He’s getting all worked up and _emotional_ and he just wants - he wants a lot of shit that he’s never gonna fuckin’ have. A gold toilet and a place that isn’t in this fucking neighborhood and free beer at every bar he ever goes into. Ian to have done what he’d promised Mickey he would do and make him feel safe.

Ian stumbles back, but he grabs at Mickey’s wrists so he can’t storm past and Mickey is gonna _deck this bitch_ except Ian is leaning forward and knocking their foreheads together hard enough that Mickey goes a little dizzy.

“_Ow_, Gallagher, what the _fuck _-”

“I want to spend your heat together.” Ian says quietly, though it sounds loud in Mickey’s ear. “I want to spend all of your fucking heats together. You want me to go all alpha and fight every drunk dad on the street? Fine. I’ll be first in line to go after Frank’s tongue if that’s what you want, I’ll put a hit on Terry, whatever the fuck you _want_, Mickey. Just..._Fuck_. Don’t do this.”

Mickey tries to wrestle his wrists away but Ian is _strong_. And maybe Mickey isn’t trying _that hard_ to get away.

He’s scratched Ian’s cheek, didn’t break the skin but there are three red lines from jaw to ear, and he’d bet he bruised him up when he kicked him off the stairs earlier. Ian’s eyes are redrimmed and fuck, don’t look at him like that, Mickey can’t ever stand up against those eyes when Ian’s about to fuckin’ cry like a baby -

The fights going out of him before he even really decides to let it.

“...four hundred and some weed.” he breathes in deep, inhales Ian’s familiar scent and has to blink against the heat in his eyes. “I’ll give you a friend of family discount, I guess.”

“Sounds like a deal to me.” Ian says with so much relief it almost bowls Mickey over. Ian ducks down - he has to _duck down_ to kiss Mickey’s short ass, what the fuck - to press a whisper of a kiss against Mickey’s lips. It’s their second kiss.

Mickey’s wrists are finally released so Ian can yank him closer by his belt loops and Mickey digs one hand into the short-short hair at the back of Ian’s head, ends up cupping his skull more than pulling at his hair. Their third kiss is harder, deeper. Mickey _tastes_ him, practically inhales Ian’s tongue in his eagerness. He can blame all of this fairy shit on the heat later, might as well lean into it. Take what he wants.

He loses track of how many kisses they share after awhile. Maybe tens by the time Ian finally drags himself away, panting and red-faced to match his hair.

“Van?” he asks quietly, “I’ll - I can - you should grab some stuff. From here. Your sheets and shit. Pack a bag. I’ll meet you there?”

“Half an hour.” Mickey nods and can’t help but give in to another kiss, even if it has to be short or risk losing them both in it again.

“I’ll find you if you aren’t there, Mickey.” Ian promises. It should be a threat, it’s definitely worded like one, but Mickey doesn’t feel threatened. He feels wanted.

“Yeah, yeah.” Mickey pushes him away, weaker than before and with far less meaning behind it. “Go. I need to count your cash and make sure you aren’t shorting me.”

“Who’d risk shorting a Milkovich?” Ian teases, smiling so bright he’s practically his own star, fucking hell.

“Leave, Gallagher.” Mickey shoves at him again and Ian walks backwards out of the house, doesn’t take his eyes off Mickey until he bangs into the front door and has to wiggle the knob to be let out.

“Half an hour.” Ian says a final time and waits for Mickey’s impatient nod before he finally closes the door behind him.

Mickey stands there like a fucking goober for at least thirty seconds, frozen in place by...all of what just happened.

And then he picks Ian's wallet up off the floor and walks in a haze to his bedroom. Mandy had left his beta cologne on his pillow - obviously before coming to pick him up. He sets it on the floor and then stripes his bed, shoves everything into a duffle, doesn’t bother grabbing anything else. He sets Ian’s wallet down on the bare mattress while he’s shoving his shoes on and it’s between tying the laces up that he hears the front door open and bang closed.

The scent of Terry permeates the house more than any other. He might spend months or weeks away at a time, but the hours he _is_ outside of jail, he spends reeking this place up. Still, Mickey has been able to recognize his dad’s fresh scent since before he’d even presented; all the better to avoid a fist or screaming fit if you knew to stay away in the first place.

All this is to say, he recognizes Terry’s entrance before the door even opens.

“Mick!” His dad shouts, more a call of attendance than a call to attention. Mickey stands up, straightens his clothes out, wipes his sweaty face off with one hand and slicks his still wet hair back with another. He has his story. He knew this might happen.

He’s getting frisky with a breeder in her heat. She promised good shit if he brought some of his shit for her to nest with. He smells like he’s leaking because _she_ leaked all over him so much even a shower couldn’t get it all off. He’ll be gone for awhile.

“Yeah?” he calls, but his voice is raspy so he clears his throat and tries again, “Hey, pops!”

“Come’re and let your old man see ya’, kid! It’s been months!”

Mickey tugs the duffle over his shoulder, straights his clothes again, feels the wet trickle down his inner thigh. He stiffens his shoulders, then lets them relax and saunters out of the room with all of the smugness of a guy going to get the lay of his life.

Like every good lie, there core of it is true, after all.

“Woah-ho-ho,” Terry stands up from the fridge, two beer bottles held between his fingers to look Mickey over with surprise, “Why do you smell like a two-cent bitch?”

“‘Cause I’m headed over to fuck one, man,” Mickey shrugs, “Just stopped by for some shit.”

“Did you take a shower in her cunt?” Terry wrinkles up his entire face. He’s drunk, Mickey can tell by the slant of his shoulders and his dopey eyes.

“Fingers crossed, pops, fingers crossed.” He grins, wide and manic, and laughs when Terry makes a disgusted face.

“Get the fuck out’ta here with that shit,” Terry waves him away, “Christ, what’re kids up to these days? Don’t come home with a brat.”

“Me? Nah.” Mickey starts backing up toward the door, “I’ll be gone for awhile. She runs long, this one.”

“Fuck do I care?” Terry says distractedly, picking up the sandwich Mickey had made earlier from the counter and taking a big bite.

Mickey doesn’t say anything else. Just turns on his heels, jets out of the house as fast as a leisurely stroll will let him jet. He really takes off when he’s turned the corner to his block, when he’s sure he’s out of Terry’s sight.

He bolts all the way to the Gallagher home, heart pounding so hard he can’t even hear his feet slapping against the pavement.

-

He’s a mess by the time he makes it to the van and night truly has settled in. It’s so hot outside that he’s already sweat through his clothes, the material sticky against his skin. He’s panting, legs achy and sides stitched from running, head so full of cotton he can’t even remember why he’s here other than that he’s pretty sure Ian is going to be here, too.

He stumbles his way to the back, feeling loaded down by his bag and duffle. The van is still there, a familiar sight even if he hasn’t really laid eyes on it in - fuck, over a year. Closer to two now.

The side door is open and he can see blankets, pillows, clothes. A fuckin’ sight better than it had been that first time. Ian is sitting in the front seat, kicking one leg back and forth while he smokes, leaning his head against the other knee.

He doesn’t immediately stand up when he spots Mickey, just takes another long drag. The cherry is bright red, more fire-pink than ginger, but it still reminds Mickey of Ian’s hair, anyway.

“Upgraded, huh?” Mickey manages to get out, and he sounds mostly normal.

“I’ve been collecting shit since the train.” Ian shrugs, “Special just for you.”

“Stop saying gay shit like that, you’re gonna make me puke.”

Ian laughs and Mickey goes to the open van, sets his duffle down and then dumps it out so his sheets and the thin blanket he calls a comforter join all of the soft materials Ian’s _gathered_. For him.

Gathered for _them_ and their fucking heat den.

He tosses the duffle to the ground and then hands off his bag to Ian when Ian pulls at it. He’s not so tired anymore.

He’s _is_ still fucking sweaty. He doesn’t care who sees him, he just starts stripping right there, everything off.

“Get in the van, Mick,” Ian urges, hand on his back and guiding. Mickey gets in the van. He takes a second while Ian climbs in after him and closes the doors to look around and take in what he has to work with. First, he gathers their clothes up and arranges them toward the front seat, the pillows in a circle and then all of the blankets laid flat underneath them to cushion the floor of the van. He brought his pillow, which he stuffs where he wants them to lay down and then just kind of...flops and rolls to make sure everything smells like Ian, like him, like _them_.

This is what he’s wanted since that first night in this van. A good nest, Ian, the kind of content safety that only an idiot in heat could feel.

“Here.” Ian nudges him back up and Mickey would bitch at him but words are hard so instead he just glares until Ian hands over a gallon jug of water. It’s _cold_, like it’s been in a fridge for a long time before making its way to Mickey’s lips.

Mickey drinks. He drinks and drinks and drinks until he’s finally not thirsty and can realize exactly how fucking thirsty he was before.

“Oh my god,” he says between chugging, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck,”

“Want an explanation or should I shut the fuck up?” Ian asks, offering up a thick store-bought sandwich like it’s a peace offering. Mickey snatches it from him and almost doesn’t manage to get the plastic wrap out of the way in time for his first bite.

“Shut up,” he says with his mouth full and Ian just smiles and watches him with this stupid, besotted sort of bullshit look and Mickey would smack him for it but he’s got his hands full with his chilled water and his turkey on rye.

Somehow, that Ian is the one that brought them to him, gave them to him, makes them both taste better than anything he’s ever had before. Fuck, he’d just stuffed himself with burgers and chips less than a couple hours ago at Jaime’s but his body feels totally empty, now.

“Okay, okay,” Ian nods, accepts the trashed wrapper back when Mickey is done inhaling his sandwich and starts going through Mickey’s bag while he drinks the rest of the water like he’s dying.

They both look at the condoms, Mickey with one eye because he’s tilting his head back to get at the bottom of the gallon and Ian with mild distaste. They’ve never really used condoms together - Mickey can’t get pregnant outside of heats, Ian wouldn’t risk going bare with anyone else and it just feels better without one. But, on the other hand, Mickey _is_ in heat now and pregnancy is kind of a thing that could happen.

Then _again_, Mickey’s heat is so long coming and has been so stunted over the last months that there’s a chance Mickey’s permanently damaged his insides. He should probably get to a doctor at some point to check on that.

Mickey plucks the box out of Ian’s hand, still drinking, and tosses them somewhere beyond the front seat.

“After-heat pill it is.” Ian says, smiling wide, and Mickey finally stops chugging, wipes the water from his mouth and chin with the back of his hand and meets Ian in the middle for a messy, desperate kiss.

Fourth kiss - hundredth kiss, it doesn’t fucking matter. Mickey could happily spend the rest of his days kissing Ian until it’s impossible to count how many kisses they’ve shared. The jug gets pulled from his hand, set somewhere hopefully out of the way, and then Ian is crawling to him, crawling on top of him, boxing him in with one hand and cupping his jaw with the other.

They’re naked. Full on, not even a sock between them, naked together for the first time. There’s no Linda or Kash or Frank or Terry to catch them, no wayward wandering assholes peeking into the wrong alleys, no reason that they can’t just lay down together and touch. Mickey wants to touch, so he does.

Ian isn’t soft. He’s hard muscles and rough skin and calluses, hair on his arms and legs and stomach. He’s got these _abs_ that Mickey really wants to rub against and these thick muscles in his thighs and arms and back. Mickey drags his hands up and down the long line of Ian’s back, just feeling the jut of his shoulder blades, the dips of his spine and ribs, the strength under the damp skin.

They’re both disgustingly sweaty. It makes Ian’s smell potent and powerful and Mickey inhales over and over like it’s the best nitrous he’s ever got his hands on.

“You should bottle your sweat and sell it.”

“You’re so fucking high right now,” Ian runs a hand through Mickey’s hair, slicking it back out of his face, off his forehead. It had dried on his run over and then got damp with sweat all over again so it sticks like everything else around him, tangles in Ian’s fingers.

Mickey shoves his face into Ian’s neck, breathes and then pokes his tongue out to taste and finds a whole new nirvana. Ian laughs when he licks at his throat and tilts his head, bares his neck for Mickey like it’s nothing.

If Mickey hadn’t already been rock hard, that would have got him there.

“Ian,” he mutters, “Ian, for fuck’s sake, you’re the expert here,”

And what he _means_ is that he has no idea what he’s doing, that he’s been too stubborn to put any research at all into what his body is doing, what he needs, what Ian needs to do. What he means is that he’s putting his trust in Ian, because he needs _help_.

Ian, amazingly, gets it.

“I’m gonna lay you out.” Ian explains simply, somehow making factual statements sound like the hottest porn Mickey’s ever heard.

Mickey hums in agreement, following the plan so far.

“I’m gonna _eat_ you out.” Ian continues, stroking a hand up Mickey’s thigh and then dipping around to rub his fingers along the slick that’s been slowly dripping from Mickey’s body for a solid hour and a half. Mickey’s definitely still following the plan.

“And then I’m gonna fuck you until you pass out on my knot.” Ian continues to run his fingers along the sensitive skin on the backs of his thighs, rubs lightly across the still-pink scar of his bullet wound. He leans down, kisses Mickey’s jaw, his shoulder, his throat when Mickey tilts his head back without a thought.

“And _then_,” he says, like this plan can get any fucking better, “when you wake up, I’m going to feed you and make sure you drink something before we do it all over again.”

“Fucking fag,” Mickey croaks, eyes burning. There’s sweat pouring down his face, making his eyes sting and ache, his cheeks flush, his nose get stuffy. The sweat slides down along his temple. Ian kisses the corners of his eyes, back and forth, soft, _loving_, and it just makes the sweating _worse_.

“Can’t you just knot me and get it over with?” Mickey proposes.

“No.” Ian decides. “Nah, I don’t think I can do that, Mickey.”

“It fuckin’ _hurts_, though.” Mickey lets Ian sit back and splay him out however he wants.

"I’ll take care of you." Ian runs his hands up Mickey's chest and back down, palms and fingers spread to touch all over. He brushes his fingertips across Mickey's nipples, keeps rubbing across Mickey's torso, touches branding Mickey's skin.

“I said cut that shit out,” Mickey swats at him mildly but can’t really get behind _pushing_ when he catches Ian’s cheeks between his hands. Instead, he pulls him back up. It isn’t their first kiss but it’s the first one _Mickey_ has really initiated and he goes for hard, hungry, tempting.

He ends up just kind of stroking Ian’s scratched up cheek with his fingertips like he’s apologizing or some shit, coaxing Ian closer and closer until he can shift his legs up, catch Ian’s hips between his knees. He’s not letting go.

Ian laughs into his mouth and grinds down like Mickey’s been _wanting_ and Mickey can feel how hard he is, can feel Ian’s tense thighs between his and the trembling of his body over Mickey’s and how badly he _wants_ \- as bad as Mickey wants.

“You’re such a fuckin’ brat, Mick,” Ian flops down with enough force to get an _ooph _from Mickey. Mickey takes the hit in order to more firmly wrap his legs around Ian.

“I’m a breeder, hotshot,” Mickey bites at his jaw, leaves a red mark just below the jawline, “Not some bitch.”

Ian’s resting on an elbow now, caging Mickey’s face in between his stupid muscles and his damned eyes, but he still has a free hand and he uses it to stroke up and down Mickey’s side in a touch that’s long become familiar. It goes lower, trailing past his ribs, the softness of his stomach, the dip of his thigh. Long fingers slip between their bodies, between Mickey’s cheeks and the first glide of callused, working fingertips to his hole hurts with how intense it is.

Mickey’s never been hit by lightning before, but he’s at least pretty sure this is how it must feel. His body jerks involuntarily, smacking into Ian’s, fingers spasming and then digging into the giving flesh beneath them. He squishes Ian’s face like a fish and has to laugh at the wide-eyed guppy on top of him, though it sounds more like a choked sob than anything.

“I’ll wake you up with the salad tossing, then.” Ian says, but it’s kind of mumbled because of the whole guppy-face thing going on. Mickey’s pretty sure he susses out what he said right and retaliates by fucking kissing him again because he’s only one fucking man and how is he to resist a line like that?

Those fingers are unforgiving and uncaring of what Ian’s face must go through to pay the toll of their travel. They slip through the slick that’s collected, teasing Mickey and preparing him for the sensations to come all at once. Mickey tries to twist his hips with them but that just ruts his boner against Ian’s and that’s a whole new feeling to add to everything goin’ on and, really, _truly_ he’s not _that_ strong.

He just goes limp. Let God have him - or, in this case, Ian. Whatever his body wants, he trusts Ian to deliver and it’s only making it worse to try to force it now that he’s locked Ian into at the very least fucking him before he starts getting fancy.

Ian kisses him again but Mickey’s torn - between Ian’s tongue and his dick and his fingers, he can’t figure out where to focus, so it’s mostly Ian kissing his gaping mouth and Mickey trying desperately to arch and rut and kiss all at once. At least he isn’t cutting crescents into Ian’s cheeks with his nails anymore.

Instead, he clutches at the back of Ian’s neck and his shoulder. He wonders if Ian’ll show off the scratches he’s surely going to leave behind when this is all said and done, if Ian will take pride in the marks like Mickey takes pride in the bites he can feel Ian sucking into his neck even now.

“Ready?” Ian asks and then slides a whole fuckin’ first into Mickey’s ass when he just glares.

It feels that way, at least, after months without anything - too scared to alert his cellmate by even wandering near the vicinity of his ass and too proud to do it himself when he had rare alone time. He yelps, like the bitch he’s just assured Ian he is fucking not, and his toes curl, dig into Ian’s calves. It’s only two fingers, he can feel that after he calms down. It takes him a second to hear past the ringing in his ears, but Ian’s been whispering shit to him like they’re Romeo and Juliet on their first fuckin’ night or something. Mickey refuses to process what he’s hearing, because he doesn’t want to have to stop what they’re doing to beat Ian the fuck up, but the way the words are shaped sure sound nice.

“Call me fuckin’ _beautiful_ again, knothead, I dare ya’,” he grouses, carefully squeezing his ass around the fingers to test it out. It’s still so fucking intense but his body is acclimating. His nerves are trying to explain to his fucking brain that what he’s feeling isn’t pain, it’s pleasure. It still _hurts_ with how intense it is, like this is the third or fourth fuck and not the prep for the first time.

“Sorry, Mick, it’s just, ya’ know,” Ian spreads his fingers out, thrusts a couple times like he’s testing things out himself and Mickey has to clutch at his shoulder and throw his head back because it’s fucking insane how _good bad so much more_ it feels. “I have eyes.” Ian finishes but Mickey’s already forgotten how the statement started.

“Fuck off.” he grunts, “Actually, _fuck me_. You can whimper your pussy shit to me later. I’m expectin’ to pass out on this knot, the way it’s been talked up.”

“I don’t think I appreciate the doubt. You blacked out over two fingers and you wanna ride my knot already?”

“Warn a guy next time, fuckhead,” Mickey defends and then Ian pushes two more fingers in without a fucking warning again and Mickey kind of _does_ black out with how good it fucking feels.

“What’s sex without a few surprises?”

Mickey slaps at his back, can’t hold back the shouts that burst from him every time Ian pushes his fingers back in. Mickey’s body is ready, has been fucking ready for _months_ now, forced into a pre-heat period long past what’s healthy or natural, and technically he really hadn’t even needed fingers. If Ian had just wanted to slip in, Mickey’s body would have happily welcomed him.

All the same, the fingering is familiar and it feels fucking _good_ even with the sparks of _too-good-now-it-hurts_, and Mickey won’t say he missed Ian, not out loud, but he has no problem saying he missed his fingers.

There’s little warning when Mickey comes. One second, he’s writhing on Ian’s hand without any control over his body or voice, and the next he’s going silent with what he really can only describe as ecstasy. He feels his body almost like it’s no longer connected to his brain, feels himself go so tense he could shatter if Ian isn’t careful, feels his cock jerk where it’s pinned between his soft stomach and Ian’s abs and dick. He can’t hear anything but a thin static and Ian’s voice, deep with arousal and possession as he works his fingers in Mickey’s body. He hasn’t even touched Mickey’s prostate yet and Mickey’s suddenly terrified for him to, if this is what it feels like without. His vision goes hazy. He can’t see anything clearly except for the green of Ian’s eyes boring into his own.

His hearing comes back slowly, a soft wave of white noise that gently washes back out to sea and lets his brain process sounds again. It’s just Ian and the ambience of their neighborhood, which is comforting in a way that Mickey can’t truly describe. Feeling comes back in waves, too. The ecstasy ebbs and flows until he’s not entirely sure it had really felt as good as he thinks it did because he isn’t sure that it’s even _possible_ to feel that good. Ian’s fingers are still moving, just stroking the slick walls past the tight muscles of his hole, stretching him and comforting him in Ian’s own fucking weird way.

His toes are curled tight, one foot still clutching Ian’s calf and the other pressed flat to the back of the passenger side seat, bracing himself.

“Woah.” Ian says because Mickey’s voice hasn’t ebbed back, yet. Mickey just nods. He’s not tired in the least, though he feels like he should be fucking exhausted after that experience.

He swallows once, twice. Ian shifts his balance to his knees and awkwardly grabs the mostly empty jug of water Mickey had discarded. He twists until he can drink the last of it. When he kisses Mickey, he pries his mouth open and lets the water transfer. Mickey swallows greedily, ends up licking into Ian’s mouth for any last drop.

“Want me to get someone to bring more out?” Ian asks between pressing his lips to Mickey’s. Mickey’s glad to see that Ian’s at least intelligent enough to know that Mickey won’t be letting him leave any time soon, though stupid enough to assume Mickey would let any other person within ten feet of either of them for the next twenty four hours at the very least. He’d rather dehydrate and die tied to Ian’s dick than let any of the other Gallagher brood deliver water.

He shakes his head for now, though, because talking is beyond him. Instead, he carefully relaxes his toes. He hadn’t realized before but he’s squeezed Ian’s fingers together into a relatively thin cluster during his orgasm to end all orgasms and he makes his lower body go loose, breathes in and out and in and out until it’s possible that he may one day return to normal society.

Ian watches him, transfixed. He’s practically invisible in the van except for the street lights peeking in through the dusty windows. Mickey can see the dirt particles in the air about as well as he can see Ian’s face; green eyes and pale skin and dark red hair, but his freckles are lost to the shadows.

He wants this boy. He has wanted him for longer than he can admit, and has a feeling that he _will_ want him for longer than he can admit. He wants him then and now and in the future. Milkoviches don’t say _I love you_. They don’t stick around for long; they live short lives and split those lives drinking in the bars or drying out in the cells and very little else is done except maybe continuing the family line when a condom’s too far away.

But this fucking boy, this ginger idiot, makes Mickey want to think about a life that isn’t spent soaking up alcohol and then drying out and fucking just to fuck. He makes him think of a shitty place of their own, like this van, and a shitty den that smells so much like them both that _they_ start to smell like them both - no more Mickey and Ian, but a smell that comes from their combination.

The sweat is back. He has to close his eyes, pull Ian closer and press his face to Ian’s shoulder. He would kiss him but he doesn’t want to give himself away. Ian shoves his face into Mickey’s damn hair, noses at his temple, kisses his cheeks, the corners of his eyes, hums instead of speaks.

“I’m warning you now.” he finally says into the quiet Mickey has created and Mickey’s making these hitched, cut-off little sounds that he refuses to qualify with a name. He nods, understanding, breathes in slow and deep, deep, deep. He holds the air in his lungs as Ian slips his fingers out, rocks his hips back, strokes himself between Mickey’s thighs with Mickey’s own slick.

He presses the head to Mickey’s hole and Mickey breathes out as Ian pushes in.

Every inch feels like an eternity. Ian is slow, so careful Mickey would be angry if he weren’t so overwhelmed. It hurts - fucking _Christ_, it hurts, but the pain is that oversensitive stitching, not _too-much_ pain. It’s because it feels so fucking good that he can’t understand it, his brain won’t process it right. He wonders, half out of his mind, if he’s feeling that because he pushed his body wrong, wonders if it would have felt like this if he’d just done this right, if they hadn’t been so fucking stupid. He wonders if he’s fucked himself up for good this time, more than a pellet to the leg - a permanent, physical change in how he processes pleasure.

He can’t complain. Not if that’s all he had to trade for _this_. It’s more than just their bodies and he knows it’s bullshit, all the romantic propaganda they peddle like crazy all year round about heats and mates. He_ knows,_ but there’s just something about Ian dicking him down in his dried out breeder dad’s fucking heat den that makes him believe in the lie, even if it’s just long enough to let Ian get stick in.

Ian isn’t a small-dicked guy. He’s packing nine inches at the conservative end and that’s not counting the flesh at the base of his dick Mickey knows can swell up to the size of a fist. Mickey is about to get railed by a foot of pure Gallagher alpha and that would probably make every beta in his family lose their goddamn minds. It’s making Mickey lose his mind, that’s for damn sure.

Ian keeps a slow, steady pressure until he’s bottomed out.

“You are the only guy I’ve ever been with that actually wants to take the whole thing.” Ian says as casually as his out-of-breath, panting voice will let him.

“That’s not the whole thing yet.” Mickey rasps back and uses the leg he’s still got around Ian’s thigh to push him deeper. The texture of the skin changes from shaft to knot, thicker and almost more giving from excess skin waiting to be filled up with blood and come.

“We’ll work it in.” Ian promises, like Mikey doubted for a second that he was gonna let Ian out of this van without taking that knot.

They do work it in. Mickey is expecting a proper go, expecting Ian to give in to the heat of Mickey’s body and have at it. It’s not like they’ve never been rough - fuck, most of their times together have been with spit as lube and two fingers of prep in the back room of a shitty convenience store. When they _did_ have lube and time, Mickey would have bruises on his hips for days and had to avoid walking for most of the rest of the day if he didn’t want to get odd looks for his impersonations of a cowboy.

This is not like those times. Ian is slow, almost methodical, every slow slide out of Mickey’s body results in a firm re-entry that gets Mickey’s toes curling and straightening and then curling again. There’s something to be said about a thrust that makes you point your feet like a fucking ballerina but Mickey isn’t sure what it is aside from _fucking good_.

With a stretch like Ian, it’s impossible to avoid Mickey’s prostate altogether. For the first time in his life, though, Mickey is fucking glad that it isn’t the focus of Ian’s attentions because every brush against it makes his teeth ache with the pain. Logically, he knows they should probably stop. That something probably is not right and needs to be addressed. Illogically, everything feels so fucking good, even the pain, that he would sew his own damn mouth shut before breathing a word that even rhymes with _stop_.

Ian reads his reactions, though, like his new job is to respond to Mickey instead of chase his own orgasm - Mickey wouldn’t blame him after already having the best one of his life just a handful of minutes ago. He doesn’t actively avoid Mickey’s prostate, an impossibility, but he leaves it be and touches everywhere his free hand can reach instead.

Mickey gets kissed and bitten, licked and sucked at, pinched and squeezed, stroked and scratched from calf to neck, like Ian’s hands are losing control because his hips can’t. Mickey basks in it, in Ian’s loss of control and his _perfect_ control, in the attention and adoration. Mickey has never felt _adored_ in his entire life, not even with Ian, until this moment. He’s the fifth youngest boy but not the youngest kid in a family where maybe only Jamie had really ever got enough attention to not ache for it in some way; being the center of all of Ian’s focus feels almost as good as the whole fucking part of it. There was always something else to think about, worry about before. Terry finding out, Kash or Linda walking in; making sure not to look like he was liking it too much, making sure _Ian_ wasn’t enjoying it too much, reeling Ian in as much as he was pushing him away. He doesn’t have to think about any of that now, though, and neither does Ian. There’s just the two of them.

Mickey doesn’t really know how long they fuck. It could be hours, it could be days, it could be seconds, minutes, years. He knows it’s an eternity all it’s own, Ian’s body and his meeting and parting and meeting; his nails scratching down Ian’s back and holding the back of his neck so tight he’s sure he’s left weird bruises as his body accepts Ian thrusting in and fights to keep him as he pulls out.

Ian’s making these soft, understated sounds almost directly into Mickey’s ear. They’re never allowed to really make noise but Mickey likes these sorts of sounds, the ones that make it seem like Ian can’t help it. Like Mickey’s dragging them from his throat.

He feels when Ian starts to work his knot in. It’s that change in texture at first, and then the change in width, barely noticeable except that Mickey’s body is very, very specifically prepared to notice it. He can’t be sure what kind of noises he’s been making the entire time, but he knows he really does sob when he finally feels the thickened skin scrape past the tense ring of his ass and press inside, knows he cries like a bitch for it when Ian pulls out and clings for dear fucking life when Ian pushes back in and Mickey actually feels it start to grow inside of him.

He leaves the passenger seat alone so he can pin Ian in place, stop him from pulling out again. He wants to feel the swell, wants to know the instant they get locked together, wants to feel the heat of Ian coming when he’s properly tied in place. He gets all of those things.

Ian growls his name, _growls_ like Mickey’s never really heard before, pins Mickey down by the hips and the hair, bites into his mouth like he owns it and grinds their bodies together. Mickey feels sort of like one of his Ben Wa beads has somehow grown inside of him - and then a golf ball, and then still somehow bigger.

“Ian.” he digs into Ian’s hip, yanks him close like if he can get him deeper it will somehow make the growing knot inside of him less intense, “Ian, oh fuck, oh _fuck_, Ian -”

“It’s okay,” Ian soothes, or tries to, but he sounds so overwhelmed that even his voice is faded, “Shh, Mick, trust me, it’s okay,”

“Do you have a fuckin’ _watermelon_ knot!?” Mickey demands, slurred and barely understandable between the _pain-pleasure-Ian-ow-more_.

“Sorry?” Ian asks, not sounding sorry at all. He keeps Mickey pinned, keeps Mickey’s head tilted back so he’s exposed his throat and Mickey doesn’t really find that he minds. Ian has had him at his mercy for - Jesus. Since the moment he looked up at Mickey from between his thighs and triggered Mickey’s presentation. What’s a fucking throat-baring when Ian’s owned his ass for this long already?

“Fuckin’ lying piece of shit,” Mickey mutters through a wince as Ian grows somehow _bigger_ \- finally stopping when Mickey feels like a goddamn football has been wedged up his ass.

“Kind of, yeah,” Ian admits, doped up grin firmly in place, and Mickey drags him down for another violent kiss. They can’t work their bodies together anymore, not with Ian firmly entrenched in him, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. Ian rocks into him and the tingling sensation of a giant ball of flesh attempting to push out of his body on top of the steady, purposeful stroking of his cock by Ian’s stomach, and the pain-pleasure of Ian being firmly knotted right against his aching prostate is enough to send Mickey rolling toward orgasm _numero dos_.

He has enough warning this time, at least, to let Ian know, too.

“I’m gonna die.” He says, the most coherent thing he’s managed since he laid down in the van, and Ian has approximately three seconds to look confused and concerned in a horny way before his eyes roll to the back of his head as Mickey’s body convulses around his knot.

Mickey would love to see his face - and maybe, next time, he will. But Mickey doesn’t have the chance this time around to see anything beyond that because, as pleasure washes back over him, the waves of white noise and sensation drowning him with tsunamis and pulling him back down every time he thinks he can almost get to the surface, he passes the fuck out right on Ian’s knot, as promised.

-

Mickey comes back to himself mid-swallow. There’s cool water in the jug again and he’s drinking it before he even wakes up.

“Slow, Mick, come on,” Ian mumbles and Mickey doesn’t bother stopping to tell him to fuck off. He’s fucking dying here, he needs to _drink_.

He does take a second between gulping desperately to get stock of what’s happening. Ian’s still knotted to him, for one, though not the size of a fucking planet anymore. He’s sticky and probably on fire somewhere with how hot he is, and his dick hurts like a motherfucker. Everything kind of hurts, and that’s probably not supposed to be how this goes, but then again, maybe it is. He’s on his back, legs spread and sore around Ian’s hips, and mostly sitting up using one, badly shaking, arm to support himself.

“Okay, Liam,” Ian sighs, giving in to Mickey ignoring him, “Thanks, kid.”

Mickey doesn’t open his eyes but he hears the van’s front door close, feels the vibrations. There’s a sheet, he realizes, over their hips, hiding them from peeking eyes.

He can’t really express his displeasure while also draining this gallon of water, but he tries to project anyway. From the way Ian rubs his stomach in smooth, big circles while he mouths at Mickey’s shoulders, he doesn’t succeed.

He finally has to breath and feels hydrated enough to slowly bring the jug down. There’s still a fourth or so sloshing around but Mickey doesn’t think he’ll have any sort of problem finishing that off in a minute.

“The kid don’t need to be smellin’ what’s goin’ on in here, Ian.” he collapses back down, finds that a pillow has somehow wedged under his head while he was out.

“He hasn’t presented yet,” Ian shrugs, “Can’t smell shit. You wanna try to change positions?”

“Fuck yes.” Mickey nudges Ian’s hand with the jug and lets Ian pry it from his hand and set it out of the way. It tugs uncomfortably at the parts of them locked together, makes Mickey squeeze instinctively. Ian reacts like he’s been tased, biting back a sharp inhale and a wince.

“Sensitive?” Mickey teases and Ian only pulls a face at him in response.

The next few minutes are spent trying to make Mickey’s body respond at fucking all to his will. They end up slowly rolling so Mickey’s on top and can, at the very least, lean back enough to give his thighs the slightest relief. Ian doesn’t look too unhappy about not needing to support himself anymore, either. He stretches out on his back, bones and joints popping into place, and Mickey can’t help but lay a hand on his stomach, rub in the drying jets of jizz that he left behind.

“Claiming me?” Ian asks behind a lazy smirk, looking tired but deeply satisfied.

Mickey shrugs, because he is, and works the come in until it’s invisible. Mickey can smell it though, underneath the scent of his heat and their coupling. He’s gonna be sure everyone can smell it after today - Ian’s family, Mickey’s family, the whole damn street. Ian is _his_.

They break for another couple minutes to recoup from the heavy toll of rolling and Ian deflates back down to a golf ball. It’s still too big to attempt pulling out, espeically with Mickey’s hole so fucking sore. It does make it easier for them to turn Mickey like a damn pinwheel, though, until the both of them can lay spooned on their sides.

“We should have just done it in this position.” Ian says tiredly, burying his face in Mickey’s neck and breathing in deeply.

“Can’t see you.” Mickey mumbles back, eyes already closed again. He pats awkwardly at the arm Ian flops over his waist, doesn’t resist when he gets pulled roughly back until they’re touching from toes to shoulders again.

“Would you punch me if I said you were cute right now?” Ian asks into his neck and Mickey aims a punch at his hip in response. It lands awkwardly and is also weak as fuck but it makes Ian laugh.

“I didn’t even say it, asshole.”

“You _thought_ it, knot-for-brains.”

“You can’t punch me every time I think you’re cute, man. You’d never get anything done.”

Mickey groans out loud, “Oh my _god_, shut the fuck up, Gallagher. I’m trying to enjoy the fucking afterglow and you’re getting your gay all over it.”

“I’m literally balls deep in your ass right now, Mick. I don’t know if I’m the one gaying it up right now.”

“Do I have to punch you again?”

“Do I get to kiss you again if you do?”

And that’s how Mickey finds himself twisted weird so Ian can kiss him, head resting in the crux of Ian’s elbow, being stroked from collarbone to hipbone by Ian’s big fucking hand. They’re kissing when Ian eventually goes down enough to mostly slip out of Mickey’s ass and they’re kissing when all of the jizz Ian shot into him makes its way out in thin would-be streams of _gross fucking come leaking from him_ alongside more slick.

Why didn’t anyone fucking tell him heats were so fucking gross? At least he already knew that the after-heat grossness was coming and could was _prepared_.

“Think you’re, like...being currently impregnated right now?” Ian asks casually between kisses and Mickey really does smack the fuck out of his hip for that, “Ow!”

“Don’t _say_ shit like that, Jesus Christ, Ian!” Mickey groans again, hand falling to his own stomach.

"Don't freak, you're not gonna pop a kid out any time soon!" Ian defends, sounding more amused than distressed, "Just…"

He rubs at Mickey's belly again, lower this time, where he's supposedly got all the baby carrying parts just jonesing for a little fuck to start forming. He presses down and Mickey grunts at the uncomfortable pressure, hides his face in Ian’s arm as he lets Ian get away with shit that he’d literally kill any other person for even attempting. Ian makes him so damn soft.

“Think of it, huh?” Ian drops his voice, barely a whisper as he continues pressing down, “Little pieces of me in you that you couldn’t dig out even if you tried. Gettin’ all up in your body and digging so deep that we literally _combine_.”

“And then combined-us ruins my body, demands all our time and money and then fucks off or, worse, _doesn’t_ and we have to support it’s dumb ass for the rest of our lives.”

“Fuck, Mick,” Ian noses at his neck, pressing hand turning to squeezing at the flesh of Mickey’s stomach instead, “I’m just imagining you swelling up with my fuckin’ kid. You’d be hot.”

“I’m not roleplaying a pregnancy kink with you right now, Red.” Mickey snorts, “When did you get a fuckin’ kink for knocked up bitches? Is that new?”

“It’s not knocked up bitches that get me hot,” Ian admits, “Just a knocked up _you_. I’d roll you over on your knees and fuck you so slow because I’d be fuckin’ scared to hurt you or it.”

“You’d poke it’s eye out with that thing,”

“I hear you get super horny when you’ve got buns in the oven.” Ian grins over Mickey’s shoulder and Mickey can feel him stiffening up against his back, ready to go again. Mickey’s not sure his body is willing but his mind sure is and that’s what matters.

“Like you need help getting horny. Fuckin’ Christ, get it in me if you’re gonna talk yourself into another orgasm, at least.” he gives in and Ian kisses up his neck in gratitude, leaves his stomach alone to stroke his own dick and then guide it back to Mickey’s hole.

He goes even slower than last time, somehow even _slower_ when he sees Mickey wince. He talks as he pushes in, still in that quiet voice, like he doesn’t want anyone but Mickey to hear.

“Seeing you get bigger every week,” he doesn’t thrust, just feeds his dick in with his fingers, hips following behind, and Mickey hadn’t known Ian was capable of being this gentle with his floppy limbs.

“Fatter.” He interrupts.

“Fatter with _our_ kid,” Ian corrects, smug, “You’d get even fuckin’ meaner, I bet.”

“I’ll show you mean -” Mickey starts but Ian stops him from turning around to grab at him by bottoming out, pushing past the now-weak ring of muscle and deep into Mickey with a shallow thrust that still makes Mickey visibly shiver.

“Or I could get you on my lap.” Ian suggests, curling their bodies together so tightly it’s like they’re already knotted. When he rolls his hips, he barely leaves Mickey’s body at all and Mickey loves it. Spooning isn’t ever gonna be his favorite position but he can see the benefits of it right now. “Get you on your knees and just sitting on me. You’d be all pissy and make me do the work anyway but I’d get to just hold your hips and watch you get off on me. Tits usually gross me out but -”

“I will fucking kill you.” Mickey warns, letting his eyes flutter closed. He’s just going to ignore Ian’s big fucking mouth and focus on his big fucking dick instead.

“Too far?” Ian practically cackles and Mickey elbows him in the ribs, takes pride in the gasp of pain.

“Everything you’re saying to me right now is too fucking far. _Tits_, motherfucker?”

“How else you gonna feed our fuckin’ kids, man? They gotta eat.”

“We are not having _kids_!”

“A house, then.” Ian sighs, going pliant against Mickey’s back as he wraps his arm around Mickey’s thigh, physically lifts it so he can sink in just a bit deeper. The texture of his knot is different again, hard already instead of soft and giving, but not starting to swell just yet.

“You want to fuck a house into me?”

“No, idiot,” Ian says with a laugh, “Let’s roleplay having a nice little house in the Chicago ‘burbs, huh?”

“Yeah, right,” Mickey laughs, too, and it isn’t fucking funny but the sound of how wistful and happy Ian is fills him with a warm feeling he’s not really familiar with. It makes him happy, though. “Can you imagine me and my knuckles in the fuckin’ suburbs?”

“Fuck the neighbors.” Ian decides, “We hate them. Linda’s always baking us shitty pies and leaving them to get stepped on with stupid bible verses and Gary down the street is one of those straight allies who never shuts up about how strong we are.”

“God, why did we move there, then?” Mickey tilts his head back and Ian takes the hint, running his nose and then his lips up Mickey’s neck and sucking marks into his skin between thoughts.

“‘Cause we liked the backyard when we looked at the house.” Ian says with finality, “It’s huge, with a big-ass white fence. You really want a dog even though you won’t say so but I’ve been holding out until we got enough room for one.”

“We sound like a couple’a queers.” Mickey’s brows crease as Ian rolls into him, sucking his teeth. His body is sore and over-sensitive and if Ian were to nail his prostate Mickey might actually cry but right now it feels - perfect. Slow and not too intense the second go around, just their bodies sliding together.

“We _are_ a couple’a queers.” Ian squeezes his thigh and Mickey gives in, lifts a hand up thoughtlessly so he can tangle their fingers together. Ian kisses the back of his hand and Mickey clutches at Ian’s hip in response, feels the flexing muscles as Ian circles his hips. “With a dog. Every morning we get up and I fuck you in the shower before I cook breakfast and we go to work. Every night, I bend you over the kitchen table and fuck you there, too, after you make dinner. We fight about laundry and vacuuming the carpet. When you’re feeling like it, sometimes you pin me down against the tree in the backyard and blow me while I try not to let Linda and Gary know my mate’s got the tongue of a god. It’s so no one tries to steal you, not because I don’t want them to know.”

Mickey tenses, nearly trips right over the edge again at that word - _mate_. Ian had said he wanted to spend all of Mickey’s heats together, sure, but neither of them has ever used that word before. Never broached that kind of topic before, even as a joke.

He holds back, but the shudder that wracks his body must give him away because Ian groans, fingertips digging into Mickey’s thigh.

“_Mate_ -” Mickey repeats, incredulous.

“That’s what I said,” Ian jerks into him, the most forceful he’s been the entire round, and it startles a choked off yelp from Mickey, gets him clenching hard around Ian’s dick. He feels Ian starting to swell and Ian’s actually buried enough that Mickey _feels_ as he changes from Ben Wa bead to golf ball to bigger.

“You’re credit’s shot,” Ian continues and Mickey almost tells him to stop, is almost too overwhelmed to keep up this dream. They’re just in a fucking van in the back of Ian’s family home and neither of them are ever leaving this damn neighborhood and they both know it.

But it’s just...such a nice dream. And it can’t hurt to imagine during his heat.

“So we used mine. There’s a picture of the mating ceremony on the wall when you walk in. I’m crying like a bitch and you’re smirking but we both look so damn happy.” Ian stops short, voice getting a little choked up. “We’re so damn happy, Mick. We’ve got a dog.”

“Pit.” Mickey says around the knot in his throat, “We found him somewhere when we were visiting your family. Named him something really fuckin’ cool and manly and shit. Bullet.”

“We named our fuckin’ dog Bullet,” Ian nods, laughing again, if a little wetly. He presses his face to the side of Mickey’s and it could be sweat or tears, really, but Mickey won’t try to guess.

“It’s a cool name.” Mickey tries to shrug it off. Quieter, he says, “I’m happy now, too, though. In this ugly fucking van.”

“Yeah?” Ian stops moving but he still clutches to Mickey like a lifeline, “You happy with me?”

“I held off my heat for four fucking months waiting for your ass, didn’t I?” Mickey grunts, carefully not looking at Ian, “I’m here, ain’t I?”

“Yeah.” Ian nods, a couple times, “Yeah, you’re here. And I’m here.”

“Yeah. Now that we’ve established that we’re both fuckin’ here, could you keep fuckin’ truckin’, man? I’m in heat, Gallagher.”

“God, you’re like a romance vampire.” Ian hisses when Mickey squeezes around him, and they both know he’s locked in good and forever now. “Mickey,” he says, voice weak, and Mickey lets go of his hip to wrap his fingers around his own cock and jerk himself off. It _hurts_, Jesus, it’s so much, but he wants to come now, wants to squeeze down so hard on Ian that he forces him into another orgasm. Immediately, Ian legs go of his thigh and bats his hand away. His hand is smoother than Mickey’s and feels infinitely hotter. Mickey’s vision goes double as he curls in on himself, squeezing so tight to Ian’s hand that he feels bones shift.

“Come on, Mick,” Ian breathes out, “Come on, come on my knot, let me feel it -”

“You’re such a fuckin’ porno,” Mickey grinds his teeth, knees curling in without his permission, toes digging into Ian’s skin again, and Ian rolls his hips just right, strips his cock bare and he finally comes with a shout that would wake the whole neighborhood if everyone weren't used to sleeping through gunshots by now.

He feels Ian go wire-tight behind him and he stops rolling and starts grinding, like he can get any deeper. Mickey doesn’t immediately pass out this time and actually gets to feel when Ian starts to come, the first rush of warmth that he can’t believe he can literally feel getting buried inside of him, and then the next wave and the next and then another until he’s pretty sure he’s going to explode. He can’t help but touch his own stomach to feel if it’s been extended by a knot and a half’s worth of come and all of the slick his body is still waiting to release over the next couple days.

It may just be his very horny imagination, but he could swear it _is_.

They come down from the highs together, no more words spoken. Mickey runs his fingers up and down Ian’s arm while Ian cups his belly protectively, an instinctive response to breeding his omega that Mickey can’t find it in himself to fault.

It takes them a lot longer to recover this time. They don’t bicker. Mickey can kind of tell that he’s probably okay for the next few hours. He’s not on fire anymore, that ache inside has been appeased for the moment. He wants to sleep, now; real, deep rest.

“Good?” Ian finally asks when he begins to go down again. Mickey nods, eyes already closed and breathing evening out. “Wanna drink?”

Mickey shakes his head, too tired to even do that.

Ian settles in behind him, pulls the sheet tighter around them to cover up even in the sticky heat of the van. Mickey doesn’t pass out this time - he falls asleep, fingers still clutched in Ian’s and being held tight.

-

That first night is the last thing Mickey remembers clearly for the next couple days. Instead, afterward, he remembers in flashes. He remembers waking up in a pit of fire, hotter than he'd even realized his body could get without exploding, remembers rolling onto his knees and begging through actual tears and sobs for Ian to make it stop.

He remembers Ian behind him, fucking him until he knots, remembers feeling like the only thing that would make his body cool down was Ian's dick, somehow.

He knows Ian must have forced food and water into him at some point, that Liam probably had to bring out and refill gallon after gallon to make up for all the fluids they were both losing. He doesn't have any recollection of those times. Just the fucking, the crying, the _begging_ for Ian's knot every moment that it wasn't in him. He remembers trying to convince Ian to bite him, claim him, mate him, just trying to trap Ian into not abandoning him to burn up.

"I'm not gonna bite you, Mick." Ian says at one point, and he _thinks_ Ian continues with, "Not when you're like this,” but it’s too late for that.

He absolutely remembers the shitstorm that followed; furious and terrified at the rejection, needing to be fucking knotted before he burnt to a crisp, raging about Ian being a liar, a fucking cheat, that he wouldn't ever claim Mickey, that Mickey was just some omega bitch to him, that he wanted some white collar slut to come sit in his lap whenever he wanted -

He remembers Ian taking the verbal beatdown without a word of defense. Just those big hands holding his hips in place, the knot choking the words off even as Mickey had worked himself into a full on rage - yelling included. He remembers Ian stroking his body like he was holy, silently proving him wrong. Remembers the sweet kisses when Mickey had finally calmed down, whispered promises that Mickey pretends he _can't _remember so he doesn't have to deal with it right now.

He remembers everything hurting. Even the fucking, coming, none of it feels as good as it hurts. It still hurts when the fucking is done for a few hours, when he's finally allowed to rest, curled up against Ian's side and shaking with exhaustion no matter how much he sleeps.

"Something's wrong." Ian says toward the end of what Mickey thinks is maybe the second or third day. He's absolutely drowned in sweat and also is sure he's soaked through most of their bedding by now. It feels like the slick is never ending, doesn't stop unless he's knotted up. Even then, it just builds up and slides out in thicker amounts alongside any spunk.

He needs a shower. He's got an untold amount of jizz lodged inside of him, some of it being held prisoner by his body's baby maker, and what isn't has dried into crust and pulls at his thigh hair every time he moves or makes his skin itch.

He doesn't want to leave their den, though. He's as vulnerable as it's possible for him to be, he couldn't fight off a baby right now - kind of literally. Fuck one of the Gallaghers _seeing_ him, he's pretty sure they've been able to _smell_ him for days now. He's suffocating himself on his own scent, overpowering even Ian’s at this point.

He feels like he's _dying_ and there is not a single thing he can do about it but tug at Ian until he splays himself atop Mickey's body, holds him tight and close and let's Mickey listen to his heartbeat until he is able to rest again.

-

"Hey," Ian flutters fingers across his back, barely touching him as he does so. Mickey can't lay against him anymore, his skin too sensitive for anything but the comforter they've somehow managed to keep mostly dry over the last couple days.

Mickey doesn't verbally respond, too tired. His body aches and yearns at the same time but the want isn't so great that he _needs_ right now. He does turn his head.

"I think we should go to a doctor."

He grunts, turns back to his previous position.

"Mick, for real. I think something is wrong. It shouldn't be hurting you every time we touch. That isn't normal."

"I told you I was fucked up." Mickey whispers, throat too dry for anything louder. Ian offers him the water jug and he takes it, sips the last dredges.

"Yeah, and now I think we need some help. At least let me talk to Vee."

Mickey doesn't interact with their neighbor often outside of the bar, but he knows she's an omega.

"What would she know?"

"I dunno," Ian sits back against the door. He's sweaty, too. Mickey thinks it may not be helping that they're locked away in a van enduring the heat of Chicago. "But she and Kev have been together forever and he's an alpha. Maybe they know what's goin' on."

"What's goin' on is I was blocking my heat for like a year and now I'm dying." Mickey snaps and immediately regrets it because it uses up the remains of his energy. "Ian, I can't fuckin' argue about this right now."

"So don't," Ian soothes. It's like he can sense that Mickey is starting to need him again because he stretches as best he can and then crawls over. Mickey slips onto his belly, crosses his arms and rests his head on them while Ian trails feather-light kisses along his back. They never were able to get around to him eating Mickey out. Maybe next time, if he survives.

"Let me clear out the house." Ian says quietly, settling on Mickey's thighs and spreading his cheeks. His hole probably looks like a war zone and Mickey is just glad his face is hidden so he doesn't have to face that humiliation. "I'll call Vee to come over. We can take some showers. I'll make you something warm to eat. Get you some fresh clothes. You and Vee can talk while I wash these sheets and clean the van up a little."

He slides in easy, even with the rawness of Mickey's ass.

Mickey grunts, pops his hips up so Ian can sink deeper. They won't be able to knot like this, but that's okay. He just wants this for now.

Ian doesn't move once he's seated, just lets them both absorb.

Mickey turns his face, staring blankly at the door and thinking about Ian's offer.

"Waste of four hundred bucks." He finally says, clutching at the comforter under his arms. "You threw away some good weed for a defective omega and a fucked up heat. Guess this is why they say to take it for a spin before you buy it, huh?"

"You are not _defective_," Ian spits back with enough force that Mickey flinches. "So shut the fuck up with that bullshit. You," he softens his voice, leans over Mickey to kiss the back of his head, hover over him as close as Mickey can handle right now, "You are worth every cent I ever get if that's what it takes. And all of Lip's weed."

Mickey can't help but laugh, jostling them both and pulling a short groan from Ian. He's probably as raw as Mickey at this point, if not more so.

"You and your fuckin' gay shit."

"Yeah, me and my gay shit." Ian agrees easily, "I wanna take you inside and get you cleaned up. Can we do that?"

Mickey deliberates and Ian let's him. He thinks about it until he can't anymore, on his knees so Ian can slowly, carefully, knot him and then basking in Ian's orgasm while Ian pets at him for awhile. When he can think clearly again, Ian's knot has gone down and there's more run-off trickling down his already-covered thighs and he's fucking tired of feeling dirty, as nice as it is to smell Ian, have Ian inside of him even when he isn't.

"You need to get them all out, hotshot," he relents, "I fucking mean it, all of them need to be gone. I can't - with alphas, I don't want -"

"I get it." Ian says, running a hand through Mickey's gross hair, "It's not like I'm really in the headspace to _share_. Even with my family."

Mickey nods, still considering. "And if you _want_ to call your sister's girlfriend…"

Ian smiles.

-

To clear out the house, Ian has to leave the van. It's the first time except for seconds of Ian disappearing to piss that they're going to be apart while Mickey's in the full swing of a heat.

Normally, his heat would be winding down by the end of the second day. Mickey doesn't know much but he knows _that_ at least.

He doesn't feel anymore sated than that first night. His body still aches to be filled and his insides still squirm at the thought of being alone.

"Ten minutes." Ian promises and kisses him until he can't think anymore. While Mickey is resting up after the last knot, Ian wiggles some boxers on, scrapes himself off as best he can, and leaves the van.

Mickey noticed the instant he's gone but tries not to care. Instead, he just stretches out as much as he wants, takes up all the room on the floor. Being left in the van so Ian can make the house safe for them, for him, is not at all like Mickey laying alone in his cell bed. It doesn't feel at all like he has been left behind again, thrown out, given up on. Not at all.

He drags one of the pillows to his face, breathes in deep, but all he can smell is himself. Without Ian in the van, his scent is rapidly being replaced. It smells like Mickey is alone - covered in semen and slick and sweat, and alone. Like he really had sold himself to some John, who got sick of his complicated shit and left after a few good fucks.

Being spread out makes him nervous. He curls up, pulls his legs up close and drags one of the gross, stiff sheets over himself, over his head. He's shivering, even though he's so hot.

He needs to go find Ian. He needs to make sure Ian hasn't just up and fuckin' left him. Mickey wouldn't blame him but he _would_ be pissed and liable to let Ian know it.

He doesn't want to leave the van, though. Doesn't want to risk running into anyone that _isn't _Ian.

He feels so alone. Used and in pain and needing, scared out of his mind that he is going to have to deal with this on his own after all. Just a defective omega in a defective neighborhood that nobody gives a shit about.

The van door opens but Ian doesn't scurry inside. The sunlight is starting to fade and it's just bright enough to make Ian's hair look like short strands of fire.

"Come on," Ian offers a hand, smiling, "Let's get cleaned up."

Mickey reaches out, takes his hand, let's Ian shuffle him into the open air. He hadn't realized how much he needed it until he can fucking breathe again.

Walking is - Jesus. His knees wobble and knock, every step is a struggle. Now that he's upright, gravity is taking its course on the sludge inside of him and he's got the sheet around his shoulders to protect him from anyone seeing come and slick free falling like his ass is the opening of a slip-n-slide.

The house _smells._ Not _awful_, not exactly comforting, either. But there are traces of Ian and Mickey focuses on that as he's led up the back stairs, into the kitchen, and then up more stairs. He thinks he might be leaving a trail of fucking disgusting crap behind him but the house is blessedly empty and he's too enthralled by a shower to care.

Ian closes the bathroom door behind them, tugs the boxers off his hips and then pushes the sheet off Mickey's shoulders and points to the sink.

"Brush your teeth. Mine's the green one."

"Ew." Mickey says instinctively but does it while Ian starts the shower, mostly so he can avoid the fight and just get under the spray.

It isn't a huge shower, but Ian ushers him in once he's spit out the toothpaste and as soon as the hot water hits, Mickey is in heaven.

Ian doesn't quite join him, just stands outside the tub with the curtain open, armed with a wash rag that he wets liberally with the spray.

"You wash your hair." He decides, "I'm gonna clean you off."

"I'm not a fuckin' toddler, dude, fuck off," Mickey starts, but Ian just looks at him and his eyes are dilated and round, heated in a way they haven't been since that first night. "Jesus, you're getting off on _this_, too!?"

"I like taking care of you." Ian says casually and then pushes Mickey forward until he's directly under the sprain and Ian can step into the tub and kneel.

Mickey tries to wash his hair, he even gets to the point of lathering his hands and scrubbing shampoo through the greasy, sweat-stiff locks before Ian is dragging the rag across delicate areas. He has to close his eyes so he doesn't get soap in them, lean forward with his arms against the wall to brace himself. Ian doesn't stop; he scrubs up the back of one leg from ankle to the crease of Mickey's ass and then repeats the process before ringing the rag out and patting his cheeks to clean there, too.

He slips fingers inside, two without hesitation, and Mickey shudders and twists but can't _look_ because there are suds in his fucking _face_. Ian drags his fingers around, carefully avoiding his prostate but helping to work the semen-slick out faster so he can let it wash away immediately.

Mickey manages to get the shampoo out of his hair and scrub his chest and arms and face down while Ian cleans him up and doesn't fall even once. Ian takes his time, taking the rag over Mickey's balls and even his dick while he fingers him until he, too, gives in and carefully removes his fingers. The water is cooling by the time he stands up and uses the rag to give himself a wipe down. Mickey’s too tired to even get hard at all.

It is the cleanest Mickey had possibly ever been. He _feels_ clean, inside and out. When he steps out, there's a fresh towel he hadn't noticed waiting on the toilet seat and he carefully lets it unfold, dries his hair and then hands it off to Ian.

Instead of drying himself off, Ian sits on the toilet seat and makes Mickey stand between his legs so he can dry him off, one limb at a time.

"Alphas are fuckin' freaks, Gallagher." Mickey frowns, though he doesn't sound as irritated as he wishes he did. Ian just grins and finally gives in, runs his head fiercely with the towel to dry his hair. When he stands, it's to kiss Mickey all over again.

"I feel like a new man." He declares as he wraps the towel around Mickey's waist and boldly leaves the bathroom naked.

"Water pressure'll do that." Mickey follows him and accepts the sweatpants and tank without comment. He's gonna soak through them within the hour but, for at least a bit, it will be nice to be _covered._

Ian just yanks on some boxers and another tank and then looks Mickey over approvingly.

"Food and laundry. I'll call Vee while it washes, okay?"

Mickey shrugs like he doesn't care. Tries to hide his nerves about calling Vee.

The shower _did_ help, though. He feels much more solid, enough to man the eggs scrambling on the stove while Ian runs out to collect their shit from the van and bring it in to get washed.

Mickey is plating the eggs - all twelve eggs from one of the cartons in the fridge - when Ian returns with the last load of clothes, their sheets already cycling through the wash.

"She'll be here in half an hour." Ian declares and then herds Mickey to the table to eat.

Mickey, honestly, isn't hungry. He's sick with nerves and his body only wants to be filled with one thing right now. He eats anyway, for the energy and because Ian is starting to look concerned.

They finish the eggs. Clean up the kitchen. Ian writes a note promising to replace the eggs and tacks it to the fridge.

"TV?" He offers.

"I want to lay down." Mickey admits, like a confession, so Ian takes him back upstairs. His mattress is bare and there's no pillow so he lays the towel they used down and they just make due with each other.

Clean and fed, Mickey's skin doesn't shy away from the touch. He tucks himself against Ian, closes his eyes, and pretends he doesn't already feel the strings of heat beginning to tighten in his belly as Ian breathes in his scent and caresses covered flesh.

"We'll get through this." Ian says simply when he feels Mickey start to shake.

Mickey nods, and just holds on tight.

-

It's closer to forty-five minutes then half an hour but Mickey manages a short, fitful nap before the sound of someone loudly banging in through the back door wakes him up.

"Ian!?" Veronica's voice echoes up the stairs and Ian shifts out from under him easily, fighting off Mickey's grabbing hands to disappear from the room.

Mickey watches the cracked door, blinking as he thinks. He couldn't explain _what_, exactly, had his brain roaring so fast, but _something_ was happening.

The cloying scent of omega reaches him through the door a few minutes into hearing muffled tones of conversation and he sits up. The pants have, as predicted, fallen victim to his body's fuck-me juice, so he shimmies out of everything and goes through Ian's drawers for replacements. He needs armor to go confront this breeder if she's touching _his_ knothead when he's pretty obviously taken.

Ian and Lip must share clothes because everything smells a little like them both. He finds a shirt that smells more like Ian and some sweats that might be Lip's and tugs them both on. The sweats fit fine but the shirt is too broad for him and definitely meant for someone with more height. It probably swallows Lip and Ian, too, so he shrugs it off. It smells more like Ian for a reason, after all.

He leaves the dirty shit behind and makes his way downstairs, tripping only once on the way.

Ian and Veronica are on opposite sides of the kitchen, Vee sitting down at the table and Ian leaning against the fridge. The bar acts as a barrier but Mickey still casts a suspicious look at the both of them when the quiet talking cuts off.

"If we're talkin' about me, I should probably fuckin' be here, I figure."

"Yeah, probably." Vee agrees immediately while Ian shifts around guiltily.

"I didn't tell her anything." Ian says quietly, "Your story, ya'know?"

Mickey shifts, crosses his arms. He doesn't want her here. He wants to be back in the van with Ian.

The washer and dryer are going, a steady background thrum. He has to wait for those, at least.

"Wanna tell me what's goin' on, kid?" She wrinkles her nose, "Well. I can tell what's going on, but obviously something's wrong if you're inviting me into your lovefest. If this is a kinky thing: one, Kev would be here and two, fucking ew, Ian, you're both ten."

"Sorry, Vee. You're a little too…" Ian makes the shame of an hour glass in front of him, "for me."

"Like 'em flat as a board, huh?"

"Preferably Mickey shaped, actually," Ian says without hesitation and Mickey goes to sit at the table because he feels dizzy.

"For real." Veronica leans forward. She smells - like a threat but also not. She's an omega but Mickey isn't _really_ worried about her. She and Kevin aren't _mated_ but they're ghetto married and that's plenty for him. She isn't in pre-heat and her scent is more like sniffing an unexpectedly crisp candle than anything. "What's happening?"

"I was in pre-heat when I got sent back in." Mickey rubs his lip, bites his thumb nail and only vaguely relaxes when Ian sits next to him. "Suppressors had finally left my system from my first stint, nurse said it would be a bad one. I lied and told her I was ending it when I went back in and took ‘em the rest of the time."

"Jesus, kid." Vee sits back in her chair, "That's fucked. Are your organs failing or something?"

"Dunno." He shrugs. "It's been...some amount of days and I'm still going as hot as I was at the beginning. Being touched hurts. Being fucked hurts. I feel like I'm burning up from the inside out. I'm pretty sure that the drugs in my system still are the only reason I'm not slobbering all over Gingerbread right now."

"There are lulls." Ian adds, looming between them with worry, "But the lulls don't last too long. Heats are supposed to be winding down by now but it's getting worse."

"No shit!" Veronica shakes her head, rubs at her face, "You probably need a hospital, Milkovich." She speaks over their protests, loud, "Just to get checked over. They can flush the blockers, give you something for the pain. I'd say just fuck it out, but you don't want to play with this stuff. You get too hot and your _brain melts_. Heats take out richer people than us every damn day."

Ian, white faced, nods.

Mickey, red faced, just glares at the table.

She pushes back. "Look...I don't have any answers and I'm sorry about it, for real. If you won't go to a doc, I've got a nurse friend I can call. Maybe get some advice."

"Can we try that plan first?" Ian asks when Mickey refuses to answer.

Veronica nods and stands, pulling her phone out as she goes. "Gimme a hot minute. She might be on shift."

Mickey reaches out under the table and digs his nails into Ian's thigh. The itch has grown into something he can't even uncomfortably ignore. He _needs_.

"I think, uh," Ian looks between them again, "Could you call me when you get a hold of her? I think Mickey and me need to…" he trails off but Vee nods without looking embarrassed. Mickey stands abruptly, grabs Ian's hand and drags him out of the house.

The van looks barren except for the caseless pillows, old and flat and stained yellow and brown with age.

Mickey pushes Ian down on the bare floor, shuts the door with a slam after crawling on top of him.

"Mick -" Ian starts, but Mickey ignores him. He's still only in boxers so Mickey makes quick work of dragging them down his thighs until his dick is free. He yanks his own sweats down just enough for them to not be in the way.

"Mickey -" Ian tries again, hands grabbing at Mickey's weirdly positioned legs urgently. Mickey takes approximately two seconds to jack his dick one whole time to make sure it's hard enough and then he sinks down on it in one fell swoop, his ass hitting Ian's thighs in the same breath that Ian's dick breaches him.

Ian doesn't say his name again, just arches hard under him and grabs at the sweatpants. He ends up knocking Mickey onto his back when he sits up from his prone position and rips the pants off. Mickey's ankles are near Ian's ears and Ian clutches at his thigh and hip, gets his own knees drawn up and one under him to help with traction.

It's a fucking weird position but Mickey can't _think _about that. About anything except Ian and his smell and his dick and how good it feels underneath how much it hurts. Ian stabs his prostate and he wails, loud enough to shake the damn van. He comes without warning, clutching at his own dick out of - comfort? Maybe? Shock?

Either way, he comes but it doesn't satisfy and he finds himself pulsing again within a handful of thrusts.

Ian holds on tighter, snaps his hips harder, and Mickey just goes for the ride and hopes Ian can help him by the end of it.

-

He passes out again, between words begging Ian to keep going and to never stop. He doesn't even make it to the knotting but his sleep eases when his body feels Ian swell up.

-

Ian has to give it to him three more times the next day, barely a half hour in between before he is able to rest for real. He drinks so much water he thinks he probably pisses enough to fill a kiddie pool and between the black out of one knot and the next he is returned his blankets and pillow cases and clothes. They smell like the Gallagher laundry stuff and Ian, himself, so he must have slipped away at some point to collect them.

He eats like a horse. Ian ends up needing to bribe Liam to talk Carl into making a secret run to the Kash 'n Grab for as much junk as Ian can bargon for. Ian gets a sandwich; Mickey gets a sandwich, a bag of chips, two gatorades and three sleeves of crackers.

"This is my life now." Mickey says in a daze, wiping crumbs off his bare chest. "I'm going to be leaking for the rest of my life and you're going to die trying to fuck me better."

"At least we'll go together." Ian says optimistically and gets a cracker to the face for his efforts. He eats it.

-

Vee calls during a lull where Mickey is recouping, apparently, because he wakes up to Mandy's voice.

"...shot someone for this shit," she's muttering when he sits up. Ian's in the front seat, mostly naked except for a pillow across his lap, and Mandy is determinedly not looking at him at all as they speak. Mickey would feel bad about stealing her guy except her guy is gay and, technically, Mickey fucked him first.

"Thanks, Mands." Ian says sincerely. "This is all of it?"

"Everything you asked for."

"Fuck, okay. Okay."

"Are you about to kill my brother, Gallagher?"

"No!" Ian frowns down at the lump in his lap. It's too dark, now, for Mickey to make out what it is, so he leans between the seats to look closer. Both Ian and Mandy jump but he doesn't pay much attention to that.

"What is this shit?" He frowns, making out a capped syringe and a couple baggies of different colored pills nestled into a towel.

Ian hesitates and then points at each as he explains, "This is something that nullifies suppressants, this is a mild sedative that's supposed to keep you relaxed and calm once the full heat comes on, and this is a numbing thing so you don't explode every time I touch you."

"So, what, the suppressants are why my heat’s being a bitch?"

"I guess?" Ian frowns while Mandy leans back on her heels and wrinkles her nose up at Mickey's stench. "Vee said her nurse friend said that you're heat's lasting so long because the suppressants are still in your system, just too weak to hold the heat back anymore. They're triggering the hormones a bunch so it isn't ending. We gotta flush 'em out and then ride out the next couple days and then it'll hopefully end. And then we take you straight to a clinic to get checked."

"Oh yeah, you and what health insurance, bitch?" Mickey scoffs but grabs one of the half finished Gatorades, "Hand the shit over, I guess."

"Her friend has a low-income place," Ian tries again even as he hands three green pills the size of Mickey's thumb nail and two white capsules over, "I told you not to worry. I'll take care of it." _Of you_, he doesn't say in front of Mandy.

"What, we gonna knock the Kash 'n Grab?" Mickey sneers, but he pops the pills back without hesitation and swallows down the Gatorade. They all taste chalky and gross, but he doesn't particularly mind.

"Not like Kash doesn't owe you after that fuckin' shooting." Ian mutters and then shakes himself out of it and holds out a hand for Mickey's arm. "No, I'm not robbing my place of employment. I know a guy who owes me some favors. We'll get you checked out."

"I hope this shit has melted all of my organs and I'll never have a heat again." Mickey grumbles and surrenders his arm.

It takes a minute and Mandy has to shine her dim phone light over Mickey's arm while Ian tries to find a vein and Mickey pretends he isn't nervous. Finally, though, there's the prick of a needle and then a shivery, cold feeling in his arm.

"Me, too." Mandy wrinkles her nose again, "The house smelled like you two fucked there. It _still_ smells like you."

Mickey hums, leaning back into the chair with a vague shrug. He thinks he should have a bigger reaction to that but decides not to. He'll save it for later. Right now, he couldn't care less.

"I've got a couple more doses of the sedative," Ian looks at what's left, "And one more dose of the numbing stuff. We'll have to see how two work and maybe split it up if we need to."

"Jaime took care of the dealer so it's not like we can get more anytime soon," Mandy says with an irritated huff and Mickey smiles before he can stop it.

He thinks about thanking her and then changes his mind. Instead, he tugs at Ian's arm. "I'm passing out again. Finish up grossing out with my sister and get your ass back here."

"Yes, sir," Mandy snaps before Ian can, but he can hear the amusement under the words so he flips her off and then collapses back into his pile of goods. He breathes the familiar scent in and finds himself sleepy all over again.

Ian and Mandy mutter together for a few more minutes but Mickey is busy letting the drugs take effect, letting his limbs grow heavy and tingly. When Ian finally joins him, Mickey can barely lift an arm to flop his hand on Ian's muscular stomach.

"Feelin' good?" Ian asks into the quiet.

Mickey hums and falls asleep to Ian's hand in his hair.

-

If Mickey thought the first two days were hazy, then the days that followed the drugs are practically gone from memory.

He remembers heat but not much pain, remembers Ian on him and in him and kissing him, remembers flashes of food and lots of water and scratching marks down Ian's back atop the scratches he’s already left. He vaguely thinks he bit Ian a couple times to hide his cries. He remembers every time that they get tied together, remembers Ian stroking his belly and mumbling nonsense into his neck while Mickey basks.

But that is _all_ he remembers when he wakes up with the birds days later. The last...four? Five-ish? Days are blurry.

Ian is conked out next to him, snoring softly with his face just barely visible in the pillow. He looks exhausted even while he's sleeping. He's holding onto Mickey's waist like someone might have to cut his arm off to get him to let go.

Mickey shoves as he sits up and Ian rolls over, curl around him as best he can while Mickey is up and he is sleeping. His arm moves with Mickey.

"Fuck's sake, Ian." He mutters, rubbing his eyes to try to wake up. He still feels tingly from the pills, muted and heavy.

He doesn't _burn_, though. His ass feels sore and tender and his dick would probably rather slough off than try to get hard or come again, and he's covered in bites and hickeys and scratches but he…otherwise he feels fine.

It's over.

He has to lay back down at that, shoving Ian out of the way again and accepting it with a sigh when Ian plants himself on top of Mickey so he won't move anymore.

It's over. He stares up at the roof of the van, feels a goofy smile start to take over his face. He'd fuckin' survived his first heat. He'd survived his first heat with _Ian_ and nobody had died. His dad hadn't found out.

He has to turn, press his face to Ian's shoulder to hide the smile. Fuck. _Fuck._

Ian wakes up a couple hours later with the biggest yawn Mickey has ever seen and a full body stretch that Mickey feels from under him.

"Mick?" He blinks open his eyes, his first word Mickey's name. Mickey kisses him, slow and light and not caring about either of their gross breath.

"You okay?" Ian asks between kisses and Mickey grins again, not feeling turned on at all and so relieved by that that he could cry.

"Great." He says with satisfaction.

"...yeah?" Ian blinks a slow smile back, eyes squinting.

Mickey doesn't dignify that with a response. Instead, he kisses Ian again, knocks them both flat and settles in to enjoy a good make out session that won't end in getting off if he has anything to say about it.

-

Mandy had brought him more clothes and Ian sneaks him into the bathroom to take a shower. It hurts more this time, when Ian helps clean him out, but it's worth it for the feeling of being _clean._

He knocks back the after-heat pills Ian hands him without a thought and eats everything Ian pushes his way while they wait for the Gallaghers to clear out for the day, locked in Ian's bedroom.

"I called in that favor." Ian tells him over a banana they've split. "We have a clinic appointment at three."

Mickey frowns, stares down at the peel in his hands. "If they tell me to spread my legs, I'll punch 'em, Ian, seriously."

"Ultrasound only." Ian promises gently, "Just a check up. And if they _do_ need to take a look, I'll be there the whole time."

"I'll punch 'em." Mickey warns again, just so Ian's prepared and stuffs the banana in his mouth.

They spend the day mostly - gag - cuddling. Mickey craves the touching even if he doesn't crave the dick as much, and Ian isn't exactly complaining, either. Mickey catches him rubbing his face into Mickey's throat more times than he can count, like he's trying to subtly scent him.

They lay in Ian's bed, blankets overhead in case anyone surprises them. Mickey rests his head on Ian's chest, listens to his heart beat while Ian runs fingers through his hair, down his bare back, touching him in all the possessive ways he isn't allowed to regularly.

When it's time for them to make their way to the clinic, Ian reluctantly puts some space between them before they leave the house.

"It's gonna suck, going back to normal." He mutters as they sit on the train. It isn't empty, but there are only a few other people, all on the other side of the car. Mickey shrugs.

"We'll figure it out." He says simply, because they will. Ian slumps, inches between them. Mickey carefully glances around before he, too, slumps, and let's his fingers barely brush Ian's.

They don't hold hands, but they let their fingers touch all the way to their stop.

The clinic is tiny, nondescript but clean, stuck between a CVS and a closed down bodega. Mickey swaggers in, Ian behind him. There are three other couples in the waiting room - a mix of knothead, breeder and beta. One pair have been crying for forever, it looks like, between the red eyes and tissues. Another pair is practically incandescent with glee, the beta women glowing while her alpha lady runs the beta's swollen belly. The last pair looks bored, sitting with a seat between them and on their phones, barely old enough to be out of school, if they are. Mickey drops into a seat while Ian goes to check them in. He hasn't been to a doctor in years, and has never been to a clinic obviously set up for omegas and pregnancies.

"It's a half hour wait." Ian says when he sits down next to him and Mickey shrugs, watching the room with bored eyes. The bored pair gets called first but another nurse comes out to talk to the crying couple. Bad news, obviously, but Mickey doesn't care enough to eavesdrop.

He flips through a magazine on omega health, tosses it away in disgust when he finds _dating advice _in it and takes Ian's NASCAR magazine when he isn't paying attention to read instead.

Shamefully, Ian picks up the omega health mag and buries his face in an article on proper diets for pre- and post-heat.

"You're so fuckin' soft." He mutters once the pregnant beta and her alpha get called back, leaving them and the crying pair and their emotional support nurse alone in the room.

"I meant what I said," Ian says defensively, "I'm gonna take care of you. This is important _stuff_, Mick."

"I'm not some no-spine bitch, fuckhead, I don’t need you monitoring my _diet_." Mickey snaps back, but Ian just grins at him and it throws him off.

"No shit." Ian nudges him, "But I _am_ a knothead and it makes me feel good to make sure you feel good, so…"

Mickey groans. "Just read your bitch mag and leave me alone."

"Sure, babe." Ian says absently, knowing full well Mickey won't be able to let that slide.

"Ay, cockmunch-" he starts, gearing up for a rant, only to be stopped by the nurse opening the door and falling out Ian's name.

"That's us." Ian says brightly, dropping his magazine and standing up. He tugs at Mickey until he unwillingly stands, too, and follows.

The last thing he sees is the nurse hugging the crying omega and then he's through the door with Ian and the nurse.

They both have to do a bunch of bullshit - get weighed, blood pressure, pulse, height, medical history written on a form thrust in front of both of them, and then they're ushered into a tiny room with an exam table and a bunch of health posters on the wall. Mickey sees one with an omega woman ready to pop out some upside down alien motherfucker, all her organs crunched up around the outline of her uterus. Her stomach is swollen well past what is natural.

It makes his insides roll. He sets a hand against his own stomach, clutches his shirt without much thought while Ian makes nice with the nurse, answers her questions for them both like Mickey’s some bitch who doesn’t know his own medical history. Nevermind that he _doesn’t_, or that he’s more focused on not hurling his guts up at the thought of his body doing what that omega’s body is doing in the poster, it’s still fuckin’ degrading.

“We’re actually not here for, uh...fertility reasons.” Ian nudges him and Mickey makes himself stop staring in horror at the poster and look at the nurse. She’s got a patient, interested pasted onto her face as she looks between them, but it isn’t probing. They could feed her whatever bullshit they wanted to and she’d just write it down and go about her life. That’s a comfort, in a weird way.

“Oh, so we’re not talking about birth control or heat suppressants?”

“I mean, I guess, in a roundabout way, we kinda are?” Ian struggles awkwardly and then looks at Mickey for support and Mickey suppresses an annoyed sigh and crosses his arms. Ian’s sat on the exam table, but Mickey can’t bring himself to sit at all, let alone on the crinkling paper next to Ian.

“Look,” he glares somewhere behind her head as he talks, “Life’s fuckin’ complicated for me. We’re pretty sure I fucked my body up somewhere between the heat suppressors I was gettn’ in the joint the first time and the second time.”

“He went back on them during pre-heat.”

She frowns, but doesn’t look, like...traumatized. Mickey isn’t the first omega to fuck around with suppressors, probably not even the first that she’s seen in this fuckin’ place. It makes something that Mickey hadn’t realized was clenched up inside relax, seeing her lack of reaction.

“Well, we can’t say that’s...advisable, but understandable, if you were going into a facility where it may have been dangerous for you.”

Mickey doesn’t scoff at _that_ understatement, if only because Ian pinches him where she can’t see.

“How long, exactly, did you extend the pre-heat?”

“Eh,” Mickey waves a hand, “Four months, maybe? It, uh...fuck, it was my first one, alright? The first go around with the suppressors fucked my rhythm up, or something, the lady inside said. Then I got sent back in just before it hit, so...maybe longer, in a way? I dunno.”

“Again, not advisable. But understandable,” the nurse types something into her laptop, looking thoughtful, “Would you mind answering a few questions about your heat? We can talk privately, if you’d prefer.”

She doesn’t look at Ian, but they all know what she means. Mickey gives the thought of sending Ian away when he’s about to be - ugh - _emotionally vulnerable_ with a stranger about his _heat_ all of the consideration it deserves and is shaking his head before she finishes.

“No,” he reaches back, lets Ian tangle their fingers together out of her sight, in the safety of the space being Mickey’s back, “Red stays. ‘Sides, he’ll probably know more than me, anyway. I was, uh...out of it a lot.”

She nods, click-clacking the keyboard without looking away from the screen, and then they spend fifteen grueling minutes discussing the last couple days. How much did Mickey _self-lubricate_, how long did he last, was he hard the whole time, how much did he eat and drink, what were his moods like, how sore was he, what did Ian give him when they decided to self-medicate, on and on. He’s sure that both his and Ian’s fingers are white with how tight he clenches them together by the end, when the fuckin’ Spanish Inquisition Part Two is over.

He doesn’t want to be here, in this sterile place, answering these sterile questions about something that hadn’t been _sterile_ at all. Fuck, it’s not even been twenty-fuckin’-four hours since the fever broke. He wants to be back in the van, in their scent, Ian curled up against him. He wants to talk to Mandy or his brothers, wants things to go back to _normal_.

But he also doesn’t want any more surprises. He doesn’t want another six-day heat as intense as this one had been, he doesn’t want to black out during sex, he doesn’t want to rely on Mandy to find the right drug combo just so he doesn’t go crazy from sensations in the back of the Gallagher Family Mobile Fuck Den. He _definitely_ doesn’t want to end up swollen up like a balloon with some fucking _thing_ feeding on him like a parasite. Jesus, like his dad wouldn’t kick him and the kid dead before it was formed enough to be _called_ a kid if that happened. Even if Mickey _wanted_ to get knocked up, he would be six feet under before he noticed his body changing if his dad found out.

“Okay,” the nurse finally stands up, nodding to them both with a smile, “The doctor will be in shortly to talk with you, but…” she hesitates and then gives a smaller, more sincere smile, “You aren’t the first omega to be in a difficult situation that forced you to make difficult decisions. We’re more resilient than others give us credit for. You’ll be okay.”

She departs, leaving them alone.

“Almost done, Mick.” Ian says into the quiet of the room. Mickey just makes himself read one of the non-omega-specific posters so he doesn’t say something he might later regret. He keeps their fingers tangled together, though, and lets Ian stroke his thumb over the back of his hand. It’s comfort enough.

-

They want to do an _exam_, want to stick some fuckin’ thing into Mickey’s body and _look inside of his freshly fucked ass_ and Mickey is not fucking joking about throwing a punch if someone tries to get near him with any of that bullshit so they nix the idea.

They do bloodwork, instead, and Mickey consents to an ultrasound - even if only after Ian looks at him with wide, red-rimmed eyes. The gel is cold and he’s seen ultrasounds on TV before but he doesn’t expect them to be as rough as they actually are. Plus, they make him drink a million gallons of water so he has a full bladder while they press down with the sensor.

He’s got elevated blah-blah-blah levels, and plenty of weird-ass drugs in his system after the make-shift flushing and all the stuff they fed him during the heat, and there’s some internal inflammation.

But nothing irreversible. Nothing permanently fucked up.

If he does something like this again, the doctor says with a serious face, then he might not be so lucky. The inflammation is in his - all the areas that make his body an _omega_ body. He’s gonna have a truly heinous menstruation cycle in the next couple days as the after-heat pill does its work and gets his body to reject the maybe-fertilized egg and he can’t take anymore suppressors until his next heat in a handful of months - nor can he take any birth control, because fucking with his hormones right now isn’t a good idea, but…

Somehow, he’s managed to not ravage his body. Nothing’s - ruined. He’s just gotta drink a lot of water, avoid smoking or drinking until his system is flushed out in a couple days, eat a good couple meals so his body stays strong and not get locked up anytime soon so he doesn’t have to take anything. It’s a tall order for a Milkovich, but Ian looks determined enough for the both of them and Mickey’s too relieved to do anything but nod until they’re back on the train and it’s just the two of them.

He won’t ever say exactly how relieved he is, not in words, but he lets Ian settle a loose arm across the back of his seat as they head back to the neighborhood.

-

“I don’t mean to be a killjoy or nothin’,” Ian says into the darkness of the van a few hours later, “But can we sleep in my room tomorrow? It’s not like my family doesn’t _know_, Mick.”

Mickey had eaten dinner with the Gallaghers after they’d come back from the clinic. His scent had been all over the fuckin’ place, he’d been made days ago, and there was no point in pretending otherwise. Plus, he was fuckin’ hungry by the time they got back and Fiona’s breeder had put out for a good meal. Only Lip had made a smug comment and then at least three of the Gallaghers had kicked him under the table so it was kind of worth it.

“No.” Mickey grumbles into the pillow.

“Frank’s gonna show up at some point,” Ian warns, but his voice is warm and fond. When he puts his mouth to Mickey’s bare shoulder, Mickey doesn’t shrug it off, which is tantamount to giving him free reign to continue and they both know it.

“Then he’ll have to find a new hole to crawl in.” Mickey lets Ian roll him over. He’s gonna start cramping tomorrow, probably, or the day after. He won’t admit it now but he’ll let Ian bully him inside with promises of heating pads or hot water bottles when those start. Until then, he wants to keep their privacy. Eventually, he’ll have to go back to his place but that won’t be for at least another week. Mandy is probably good for one more “bring me clothes and my beta scent, bitch” favor. She’s also probably found Ian’s wallet - and the money and weed inside of it - by now and has taken what she’s wanted in compensation.

“Okay.” Ian gives in easily and just presses more kisses down Mickey’s chest. Mickey goes soft, lets him do what the fuck ever. It feels good - not just sexually, but _physically_, in a way he can’t quite describe. Ian doesn’t turn it into anything sexy - they’re both fucked out after the last handful of days. Instead, he just trails his lips down to Mickey’s stomach and then turns his head and rests it on Mickey like he’s a pillow.

Mickey strokes a hand through short, red hair and feels - cared for. _Taken care of_.

He won’t say thanks, and Gallagher wouldn’t accept it if he did, anyway.

He sleeps, instead, with Ian cradled between his legs, the two of them twined together in the security of their makeshift den.

One day, Ian’s promised him a real place. A place they can make their own, a place that they can scent and lock the world out from with more than just van doors.

Until then, though, he’s good here. He’s _happy_ here. He’s safe.


End file.
